ACCESS and subsidiary PalmSource announced the next version of the OS soon to be formerly known as Palm OS. It's called ALP. (Could be just a code name--sources disagree on this.) At first glance the announcement looked like a disappointment. The Linux-based version of the new OS PalmSource has essentially been working on since 2002 will not be released this summer as originally announced, but will arrive around the end of this year. Sheesh.
That wouldn't classify as a "surprise," though. We could have guessed that some changes of plans would occur when the acquisition of PalmSource by ACCESS was complete, and we already knew PalmSource was experiencing some personnel problems that I suspect are putting a crimp on development.
What is a surprise are two salient features of the new OS, and they both seem promising. First, the GUI toolkit for ALP is not the one we expected. See, this was supposed to be Palm OS Cobalt ported to a Linux kernel, which meant the UI was going to be provided by Picasso, the GUI engine from the BeOS that PalmSource acquired some years back. That was the announced plan at the 2005 DevCon. Now, we see that ALP will be using GTK+. Former PalmSource Linux engineer Marty Fouts reports that the Cobalt framework turned out to be "a very bad match" with Linux, whereas GTK was born on Linux.
All this means that at least three new mobile Linux platforms are now based on GTK: Nokia's Maemo platform, Handheld.org's GPE project, and now ALP. PalmSource's "Rome" UI--the user interface concept intended to allow the Palm OS to transition to devices that don't have touchscreens--is alive and well; it's just been ported to GTK+. The good news is that since PalmSource will be exposing the GTK+ libraries to 3rd party developers it may be relatively easy to port software from other GTK-based systems over to ALP. Linux hackers will like this very much and that in itself makes it a good move, in my opinion.
An even bigger surprise is that ALP is going to ship with its own built-in relational database engine: a port of the open source SQLite. This is something I've been on PalmSource's case about for almost 3 years, but never expected they'd listen. (Not that listening to me had anything to do with the decision, mind you.) It looks to me that with the addition of a full fledged file system for flash RAM and an SQL database engine, this will be the first version of Palm OS that doesn't use the ancient DataManager API for persisting data. This may prove to be a bit of a hardship for Palm developers wanting to port their apps to the new system, but it's going to be a very welcome thing to practically every other database application developer, who expects to deal with entities like rows and columns, queries and foreign keys, not raw byte arrays with no schema whatsoever. So far the response from the Palm developers I've spoken to has been positive: a lot of us who do business apps that require fancy relational logic end up buying proprietary database engines from IBM or Sybase anyway, so we'll be happy if we don't have to keep doing that. And there seems to be agreement that SQLite has a nice, easy-to-use API.
ALP is looking more like OSX all the time in terms of its proliferation of APIs. It appears that it will support no less than four APIs for adding third party software to a handset: GTK+, Java, the Palm OS emulation layer, and the new MAX application framework, which gives the greatest exposure to the multi-tasking capabilities and services of the new system. Actually there are five APIs if you count the NetFront SDK, which is evolving in the direction of turning your browser into an AJAX-driven application engine in its own right. Kinda crazy, but something for everyone, hmm?
I keep saying this, but contrary to what you hear all the time in the user groups I do believe we're early in the game and that PalmSource has an excellent chance to be the first vendor to market with a really compelling--and successful--mobile Linux platform. It takes guts to admit mistakes and perform costly course changes (although external forces may be at work here in the form of PalmSource's new Japanese overlords). Either way, I read these changes as signs that some good decisions are being made in the wake of what we must now consider to be the almost unmitigated disaster of Palm OS Cobalt.
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