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."

More information on the topic

[storl]

There is some more information here [theregister.co.uk] if anyone is interested.

Re:Now I need an external keyboard

[Jetboy01]

Maybe the Nokia 6800 is the phone for you:

Nokia 6800 [nokia.co.uk]

built in qwerty keyboard, quite nice, and not as heavy or bulky as you would expect.

Re:Now I need an external keyboard

[tealover]

Maybe you want to take a look at this virtual keyboard [yahoo.com]. Kinda cool, huh?

Wrong link

[Accipiter]

How about a link [theregister.co.uk] to the better, more informative article where the actual information lies?

Re:Next mobile

[aallan]

Big question - does it have an SSH client?

What? For the Nokia Series 60 platform? Yes!

I SSH into my workplace UNIX box from my Nokia 3650 [nokia.com] moderately regularly. The SSH client for SymbainOS is a port of PuTTY and can be found here [sourceforge.net].

Al.

Re:Pure nonsense

[godIsaDJ]

What about OPL [symbiandiaries.com]?
It's open source (something we all like), BASIC-like but to me almost a scripting language. Extensible and *very* powerful!

However, Perl will be welcome, actually *any* language should be welcome.
Why do you think there should be less development solutions for Symbian OS that say Linux?

And furthermore...

[JZip]

Wherever this was quoted from, it's got an additional point to be made from it:

Perl is probably fine for half arsed system scripts that don't exceed 50 lines or so, but it is a hindrance and an abomination to a professional development environment

Perl can be used by people who are not professional developers--people like "half arsed system" administrators who like to actually do useful things. Non-technical people can do things with Perl, too. Granted, sometimes they make awful mistakes, and on a networked device, that's scary. But tools for the n0n-l33t are a Good Thing, except maybe for some 3(g0)l33t15t5.

Re:Next mobile

[Fizzl]

Well.. It doesn't work quite that way.
Symbian creates a platform. It's not 'Nokia Symbian', it's just Symbian. The nokia S60 is another layer of itself so it's not automagically backported to Symbian. (UIQ is actually just a reference UI for Symbian 7. Nokia made it's own -- S60+S80+S90, SonyEricsson decided to use the UIQ)

After that the customers (Nokia, SonyEricsson and so forth) throw out what they don't want, recode some parts which they want to interface their own way and code new ones.

I strongly suspect this perl thingie will be Nokia proprietary piece.
Nokia has a good history of making open API's thou. So I think they might very well make atleast the specs available for other symbian owners and customers.

Of course, any Nokai UI/Platform customer phone will have it also.

Re:Language Thrashing

[Tim C]

Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE.

I do hope you're joking - I've been a Java programmer for 3.5 years now, and while I certainly *could* use vi (and some of my colleagues do), I wouldn't choose to do so.

There are a great many proper IDEs available for developing Java, including Borland's JBuilder (which includes a free-as-in-beer version for personal use), netbeans (Free), eclipse (Free), AnyJ (free under Linux), etc.

Sure, you can use your favourite text editor and ant, but why make life difficult for yourself?

Re:This is a great idea

[chromatic]

Perl, the fully interpreted language?

Perl has a compiler and a virtual machine just like Java does. In cases where high performance is really necessary, perhaps Nokia will cache bytecode or use a persistent interpreter.

With that said, I'd rather see them use Parrot, as it's a nicer approach in the long term.

Re:This is a great idea

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Perl, the fully interpreted language?
Perl isn't fully interpreted. I'ts processed and "compiled" to an internal bytecode, then executed. Perl 6 makes this more explicit with the breakout of the Parrot VM. Picture you being able to run java on java sources directly, because there is a hidden pass to javac on every run.

Different times

[ducomputergeek]

PERL is great, but the reason why it became extremely popular for the Internet was you had two choices to make a webpage dynamic back in the day: PERL and C/C++. PERL is an extremely power text parsing tool and I still use it in today over the more common PHP for webpage design for certain things.

But it would seem like JAVA would be more ideal for cell phones for basic programs, however I am sure we'll see a 1001 nokia address orgainizing scripts here soon.

Re:Pure nonsense

[gl4ss]

it is? well that url you pointed to didn't actually say so. series60 does not have 'personal java' like p800 or communicators do.

if i'm wrong, prove it with one app that does it and preferebly a sdk too.

"The Nokia 7650 smartphone, released in Q3 2002, is a member of the Nokia Series 60 UI family. This model runs Symbian OS v6.1 customised to the Series 60 look and feel and supports Java MIDP 1.0. In addition, Nokia provide a couple of proprietary extension APIs (in the com.nokia.mid.sound and com.nokia.mid.ui packages).

The Sony Ericsson P800, released in Q4 2002, is based on Symbian OS Version 7.0 and uses the UIQ user interface. This device supports MIDP 1.0 and PersonalJava.

The Nokia 3650 is another Series 60 phone which shipped in Q1 2003. This device also runs MIDP 1.0. However, Nokia has additionally provided implementations of the Wireless Messaging API and Mobile Multimedia API for this model. "

those couple of extra api's in nokias phones aren't that much.