Maybe it can give Java ME a bit of healty competition? [LWN.net]

Maybe it can give Java ME a bit of healty competition?

Posted Feb 1, 2006 2:32 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Maybe it can give Java ME a bit of healty competition? by fredrik
Parent article: Nokia to Release Python for S60 Source Code

How is this going to cause vendor lock-in?

Is the code that you write to for this python 360 going to have to differ significantly from normal python code? Is some critical python modules significantly different in syntax and behavior from what is supplied in the official python releases?

And seeing how you can take this code from this python doo-dad and port it to other devices, were with java me you can only use it on devices that the java me runs on already.. I just don't see the lock-in angle so much.

Now I don't know anything about the s60 stuff, but I am actually curious.

Reason for vendor lock-in observation

Posted Feb 1, 2006 8:16 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, there is (AFAIK) only one vendor who provides devices with the S60 platform. So, as soon as you develop for that platform you can only use your software on Nokia devices. Even if you use python, which is platform agnostic in general, when using the S60 platform specific api:s, you get a lock-in effect.

One could of course argue that the java-path is a similar form of platform lock-in. Obviously Java ME source code wont work on non-java devices. The difference is that you can buy devices from most providers (sony ericsson, nokia, siemens, lg, motorola) and get a reasonable level of hardware platform independence.

Now, I must confess that I have not tried to develop with the python api on the S60 platform - though I hope to have time to do so soon - so I can't say for sure what level of nokia-specific code will be involved. And Java ME really isn't the holy grale, work arounds for specific phones are common. I guess it's somewhat a matter of semantics...

Reason for vendor lock-in observation

Posted Feb 1, 2006 11:12 UTC (Wed) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link]

Plenty of comanies have licened Series 60 and actually made phones that run on it. check out http://www.s60.com/ it is however a smartphone OS and thus currently limited to about 10% of the market at best wheras j2me can obviously address a larger base. However for things like rapid prototyping Python can't be beat. Sort of the same niche it has on the desktop GUI actually.