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The WDN Symbian DevZone... Richard Interviews Mark Lummus VP Business Development
at AppForge
by Richard Bloor, May 20, 2002
AppForge is a familiar tool to both Palm and Pocket PC developers. It is
now bringing Visual Basic development to the Nokia 9200 Series
Communicators and is likely to be enabled for other Symbian devices in
the future. This week we conclude our interview with Mark Lummus VP Business
Development at AppForge and take a closer look at some of the
advantages and capabilities of AppForge.
WDN: I can see that the decision to support Basic was taken quite early,
what was the motivation in support Visual Basic in particular?
Mark: Programming these small devices was, we had learnt with our
Industrial Design staff, very problematic. You have to have a very
specialized computer engineer to develop this software plus Industrial
Designer to do the graphic design.
But why not train the Industrial designers in a language they can easily
understand? They can then do the software interface design, and this is
what we have done. As a case in point, Industrial Designers, not
programmers, create all our demonstration applications. So this is the
power of a language like Visual Basic it is accessible not just to
programmers but a wider audience.
We did some Market research and that concluded that VB is the world’s
most popular language but not just with individual programmers it is
also the most popular language in the enterprise. So the choice was
obvious, VB is popular and accessible in a way that Java and C++ are
not.
One of our developers is Grant Fraser, CEO of Medical Wizards. He's an
emergency room (ER) surgeon by training. He has a line of products,
which he developed himself, using VB for the pediatrics market, selling to
both doctors and parents. Guys like Grant would never have used Java,
C++ or assembler, so we have enabled a different type of developer.
WDN: At the Symbian Developers Expo you announced that you were
working with Palm developers to bring the "top 100" Palm applications to
Symbian, given what we have discussed this has presumably been
technically quite easy?
Mark: Yes, Symbian OS is powerful and sophisticated, has great
capabilities but quite frankly it is a bit daunting for most developers. As
we showed at the Symbian Developer Expo using AppForge it can be
quite easy to harness the power and richness without the complexity of
Java or C++. For example, we have encapsulated the SMS functionality
so the AppForge developer is able to format an SMS message in 2 lines of
code and that’s not possible using C++. In fact, we demonstrated the
SMS capabilities of AppForge at the Symbian Developer Expo. We made
it look so easy, that the people from Intel didn't believe that it was real!
We had to rewrite the app in their presence and then send a short
message to their phone. Boy were they surprised!
One of our clients, a commercial developer for the Palm platform, was
able to create 36 applications between October last year and today for
Palm. They ported 16 of these applications to Pocket PC over a weekend,
doubling their revenue potential very quickly. They are now supporting
two different audiences with the same code base. So when we see
market penetration of the Symbian phones they can do that port and
triple there sales potential all with the same code.
The launch of Nokia 9290 will see a tremendous flood of applications
hitting the market at the same time. Everyone is just thrilled at the
response we are getting for this phone it's going to be just phenomenal.
We are now signing up 3 or 4 new commercial developers a day who want
to move their applications from Palm and Pocket PC to Symbian.
WDN: Perhaps we can now talk a bit more about the technical
capabilities of AppForge. For example, your FAQ’s state that all the
native Symbian APIs will be available to the AppForge developer, how is
that achieved?
Mark: Yes we have a technology called Fuser, a way to wrap APIs, so
that they are accessible from VB. You are not going to see every single
object or class that is available in Symbian OS exposed in the standard
AppForge product. There are so many and bear in mind we started work
on this in January, so we could not have done them all even if we wanted
to.
But what the developer is able to do with Fuser is pick the native APIs,
put some code round them and access them from an AppForge
application.
WDN: Presumably doing this however will limit the cross platform
capabilities of the application?
Mark: Yes it will. Its challenging when you are trying to be cross
platform, offering a solution which gives you the richness of the
individual device or platform but in such a way that you don't have to
throw away all of your code when you move to a similar device but not
the same OS. What we have done is provide a common interface to
common functionality, I mentioned SMS before, what we provide is an
object model to do SMS messaging, we do some work under the covers to
wrap the underlying technology so the VB developer has a standard
mechanism for handling SMS. So their code can stay the same as they
move across devices. Did you know that the APIs for doing SMS are
different between the Handspring Treo, Kyocera QCP 6035, and the
Samsung I300? And they are all Palm OS powered!
Obviously there will be differences between each device, screen size, color
depth, touch screen versus keyboard and so forth, but these changes are
trivial compared to having to recode underlying functionality, your
networking layer for instance. Fuser allows the developer to decide
whether they are multi-platform, using specific platform capabilities to
the full, or cross-platform.
A case in point, KSE has created a Fuser to wrap up their KSE Truefax
product for the Pocket PC and present the fax capabilities to the VB
programmer and its totally specific to their solution. The important thing
is that they could wrap up the functionality and deliver it to the VB
programmer and we did not need to get involved.
WDN: So there would appear to be quite a lot of scope for extending the
features available to the VB developer, are you doing anything particular
in this area?
Mark: Yes, one of the important aspects of the AppForge system, which
may not be immediately apparent, utilizes the fact that VB is a
component based development environment. What we have done is build
into Booster what is essentially a cross platform version of Microsoft
COM. This means that we can enable component developers to deliver
components to plug into AppForge and offer them on all the different
platforms. I'll give you a couple of examples.
About 4 weeks ago Palm announced that they were offering a solution to
allow programmers to create wireless database solutions. Under the
covers they have a server proxy that talks to any number of database
backends, a client on the device and they use AppForge to create the
applications using a VB Active X plug-in control. So here is Palm
shipping a solution which is ultimately a component for AppForge
Booster.
Another company, Extended Systems have a product called Extend
Connect Mobile Objects. Again the same scenario, it is a remote data
solution with a component that plugs in to the VB environment.
We are also developing relationships with the leading Enterprise
Database vendors who are going to be announcing plug-ins for AppForge
starting with our first major announcement and Beta program hopefully
in May. This is a recognizable database Vendor offering a solution that is
ultimately programmable in VB that runs on Palm, Pocket PC and, if they
can do it in time, Symbian, all from the same object model.
We are finding an excitement round our support of Symbian with a
number of Enterprise Database and middleware companies. They see
Symbian as a great opportunity because ultimately they know where
Symbian is going with the smartphone. With AppForge they have the
ability to target corporate developers who they could not have reached
with Java or C++ implementation and this is causing a lot of excitement.
WDN: In many ways Symbian OS is quite different from Palm or Pocket
PC, were there any particular challenges or advantages in the Symbian
OS for the implementation of booster?
Mark: There were some challenges in implementing the different events
model that Symbian provided. As you know the VB model provides a
number of interaction events, click, mouse up, mouse down and so on.
We synthesize all of these VB events within Booster by taking the events
provided by Symbian OS and translating them, sometimes combining
multiple events to give one VB event, sometimes taking a single OS event
and creating multiple VB events.
Another challenge is ensuring the richness of our UI on a particular
device and trying to keep it pixel to pixel accurate from the Windows
development environment and onto your Palm, Pocket PC or Symbian
device. We then have to balance this with matching the native
appearance. So Booster matches, for example, buttons giving the Palm
it’s rounded flat rectangle and Pocket PC its 3D rectangle with a shadow.
We are providing WYSIWYG development for Palm, Pocket PC, and
Symbian from the same development environment!
WDN: Moving into the future, given that Microsoft have now announced
when Visual Basic 6 will no longer be supported will you be moving to
supporting Visual Basic.net?
Mark: We have been a member of the Visual Studio Integration program
for a number of years and have been watching the development of Visual
Basic.net, Visual Studio.net and .net in general. We have committed to
supporting .net, our product is currently in development and we expect
to release it this summer.
Visual Studio .net does give us some significant opportunities and we are
very excited about that. We are currently pushing the envelope of what
can be done with VB 6. With support for VB 7 in the Visual Studio .net
environment we can do a lot of things we would like to do but are not
possible in VB 6 or Visual Studio. So with Visual Studio .net we can do
things like insert ourselves as a language, do in editor highlighting to
show certain code, integrate device level debugging into the environment,
a tight integration between a device emulator or an actual device and use
VB as the front end for that. So there are many opportunities for new
features and capabilities in the product for the future.
What we are seeing from our developers is some that want to use VB.net,
some who want to stick to VB6, at least for the time being. So we will be
supporting both for some time and how we will do that will become clear
this summer.
WDN: Mark, thanks for talking to WDN. Perhaps we can finish by
discussing what the Symbian developer can do to prepare themselves for
AppForge's Symbian support.
Mark: The Symbian developer can start work now with our current
version of AppForge, they can build and test their application using the
cross-platform capabilities and then when the final version becomes
available they can do any final changes, test the application in the
Symbian emulator and on their device.
For more information on AppForge for the Symbian OS visit the AppForge
web site (www.appforge.com). Also watch out for a review of AppForge and AppForge tutorials
in forthcoming columns.
See Also Appforge Interview Part 1
About the "WDN Symbian Guy" Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor has 16 years experience in the IT industry. His earlier
work was largely in design and development of commercial and
manufacturing systems but more recently has focused on
development and test management of government systems.
Richard Bloor is the Mobile Applications champion at System
Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
Richard can be reached at rbloor@wirelessdevnet.com.
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