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Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles
jonknee writes "MobileTracker notes that Nokia has made it clear that the Perl scripting language is coming to its popular Series 60 devices. This will be a huge boon to mobile software. Just look what happened to the web when CGI got popular. A time frame was not announced."
the current choices (C++, Java) are overkill for a lot of applications
They are right, for ripping info off of web pages and stuff you just can't compare C++ and Java to Perl because of the overhead, kudos. Now you can make perl scripts to provide real time quotes off of various websites very quickly, this is great news.
Since this is coming for the Nokia Symbian 6 platform, I would think it's only a matter of time until it comes to the Sony Ericsson smartphones.
I work in a computer/phone shop and have used most things on the market - any high end Sony is better than a Nokia. The P900 has plenty of software available (MAME, Opera, AIM to name but a few) - a perl upgrade does not change the fact that Nokia is running Symbian on an inferior piece of hardware.
Big question - does it have an SSH client? That would be a killer app for me, assuming latencies on GPRS are reasonable.
:-)
It goes without saying that it's bound to have an IRC client
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
it will on depend on what they will make available on it, some extensions to create dialogs and stuff would make creating simple software for it easier, a lot easier to start doing simple software for it at least.
j2me can't access the filesystem and stuff like that directly, so that limits a lot what you can do with j2me java.
and symbian c++ isn't that straightforward to pick up and the sdk isn't that hot either(grr.. i wish i had some GOOD book on it, learning it as i go at the moment), even though that's the way to do powerful applications and seems to have some logic once you 'get in it'. j2me on the other hand was very easy to pick up.
so it would be very nice to have some light(to write) scripting language that could access the whole hardware(for doing apps that do periodical file uploads, analyze some files or whatever).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I was at Borland when the C++ effort started scaling up, and there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who thought that there was going to be a huge demand for personal device apps. Obviously there's the same feeling at Nokia, only more so. I suspect that this market is not living up to expectation -- the only apps that generate any buzz are phonecams and games, and there's only so much market for those. Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.
You should know better than to repy to an AC.
However let me chime in also, were I work we just released a web based control system that monitors and controls a large remote vessel for the Navy. The system continuously monitors vessel roll, pitch, ballast levels, mooring tensions, intrusion detection, etc.
This vessel is research platform is unattended for long periods of time. If an alarm condition is encountered the system starts a generator fires up a long haul net connection and sends data and images and dispatches alarm e-mails and phone messages.
I think we can use the term "mission critical" for this application. It is written with Perl and uses Apache sitting on top of Linux.
Oh and by the way we got to do this job because of a similar successful system that monitors and provide critical control for a research submersible.
We have about 15k lines of code libraries that are well written, modular and easy to maintain. Perl's facilities promote packaging your design into small self-contained objects and features like built in (and fast) reg exp, symbolic references, tie, fast (near C like) I/O, etc are fantastic tools that speed development.