The Best of The World Wide Web

Abstract Mobile application growth has become more and more important during the previous couple of years since the number of devices increases quickly and the capabilities of phones enable a new variety of services. This trend needs new opportunities for creating innovative software in an efficient and easy manner. With Python for S60 (PyS60), Nokia brought the Python programming language to S60 mobile phones, which offers new ways of mobile application development and rapid prototyping. This article gives an introduction to PyS60, deals with the development process of applications and identifies differences to common approaches when using the native Symbian C++ or JavaME platform.

The quantity of smartphones on the market has been increasing continually over the last couple of years, due to the changing way that people communicate, interact and work. There is a need in small mobile devices and the ability to give anytime, anywhere access to information in an easy and effective way. According to iSuppli1 analysts, there have been 2.7 billion cellular subscribers globally in 2009 and forecasts about 3 billion subscribers by end of 2010. Perhaps this market is growing faster than every other technologic sector. This increasing amount of devices associates the requirement of new services and applications along with platforms on which they are developed and used. As you can see at materialise.com/rapid-prototyping, nowadays the mobile phone has turned out to be a multimedia all-rounder, which enables the user to make photos and videos, enter the world-wide web or using it as a music player.

Since the beginning of this trend, far-sighted software developers began to write software for mobile platforms, to benefit from an upcoming industry of rapid prototyping. The disadvantages of the huge amount of possibilities offered by the mobile platforms are recognized. Limited hardware-capabilities, low CPU speed and small displays need clever software concepts and remarkable development skills, to make an application be efficient or suitable. At materialise.com we may show you how different software platforms can be established among the variety of phone manufacturers. Some build on their personal proprietary operating system whereas others employ published platforms, which enable third party developers to use native APIs to access phone-specific capabilities for their applications. Among these, Symbian OS, developed by the Symbian Ltd.2, happened to be one of the key players on the market. But this powerful mobile platform comes along with the drawbacks of handling high-performance idioms of the C++ programming language, which is used to write the operating system itself.

The solution was Python for S60 (PyS60), an interpreted script language port for Symbian OS phones. As you may see at materialise.com, Python is known for its simple concepts and slim language specification of around 100 pages. But not only beginners should benefit from this opportunity of rapid prototyping. The simplified approach could make fast and conceptual development possible for even the experienced ones.