Access Linux Platform

Last updated

The Access Linux Platform (ALP), is a discontinued open-source software based operating system, once referred to as a "next-generation version of the Palm OS," for mobile devices developed and marketed by Access Co., of Tokyo, Japan. The platform included execution environments for Java, classic Palm OS, and GTK+-based native Linux applications. ALP was demonstrated in devices [1] at a variety of conferences, including 3GSM, [2] LinuxWorld, [3] GUADEC, and Open Source in Mobile.

Contents

The ALP was first announced in February 2006. [4] The initial versions of the platform and software development kits were officially released in February 2007. [5] There was a coordinated effort by Access, Esteemo, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, and Panasonic to use the platform as a basis for a shared platform implementing a revised version of the i.mode Mobile Oriented Applications Platform (MOAP) (L) application programming interfaces (APIs), conforming to the specifications of the LiMo Foundation. The first smartphone to use the ALP was to be the Edelweiss by Emblaze Mobile that was scheduled for mid-2009. [6] [7] However, it was shelved before release. [8] The First Else (renamed from Monolith [9] ) smartphone, that was being developed by Sharp Corporation in cooperation with Emblaze Mobile and seven other partners, was scheduled for 2009, but was never released and officially cancelled in June 2010. [10] [11] The platform is no longer referenced on Access's website, [12] but Panasonic and NEC released a number of ALP phones for the Japanese market between 2010 and 2013.

Look and feel

The user interface was designed with similar general goals to earlier Palm OS releases, with an aim of preserving the Zen of Palm, a design philosophy centered on making the applications as simple as possible. [13] Other aspects of the interface included a task-based orientation rather than a file/document orientation as is commonly found on desktop systems.

The appearance of the platform [14] was intended to be highly customizable to provide differentiation for specific devices and contexts.

In the last releases, they went for a much more modern look with gesture support, and were no longer close to the Palm OS.

Base frameworks

Similarly to Maemo, Nokia's internet tablet framework, ALP was based on components drawn from the GNOME project, including the GTK+ and GStreamer frameworks. A variety of other core components were drawn from mainstream open source projects, including BlueZ, matchbox, cramfs, and others. These components were licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and other open source licenses, meaning that ALP was a free or open environment on the software level.

Several components from ALP were released under the Mozilla Public License as The Hiker Project. [15] [16] These components addressed issues of application life-cycle, intertask communication, exchange and use of structured data, security, time and event-based notifications, and other areas common to the development of applications for mobile devices.

Application development

The ALP presented standard APIs for most common operations, as defined by the standards for Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and Linux Standard Base (LSB). However, neither standard addresses telephony, device customizing, messaging, or several other topics, so several other frameworks and APIs were defined by Access for those.

Applications for ALP could be developed as Linux-native code in C or C++, as legacy Palm OS applications (which run in the Garnet VM emulation environment), or in Java. Further execution environments were supported via the development of a launchpad used by the Application Manager (part of the Hiker framework).

The ALP SDK used an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE), with added plug-ins, as did its predecessor Palm OS development environment. The compilers used were embedded application binary interface (EABI) enabled ARM versions of the standard GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) tool chain.

Security

The ALP used a combination of a user-space policy-based security framework and a kernel-space Linux security module to implement fine-grained access controls. The components for ALP's security implementation have been released as part of the Hiker framework. Controls were based on signatures and certificates; unsigned applications can be allowed access to a predefined set of safe APIs.

Devices

Panasonic cellular phones with ALP:

NEC cellular phones with ALP:

See also

Related Research Articles

Palm OS Mobile operating system

Palm OS is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management. Later versions of the OS have been extended to support smartphones. Several other licensees have manufactured devices powered by Palm OS.

Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices. Java ME was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition or J2ME.

In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is implemented on multiple computing platforms. Cross-platform software may be divided into two types; one requires individual building or compilation for each platform that it supports, and the other one can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, e.g., software written in an interpreted language or pre-compiled portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all platforms.

A computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.

C++Builder is a rapid application development (RAD) environment, originally developed by Borland and as of 2009 owned by Embarcadero Technologies, for writing programs in the C++ programming language targeting Windows NT, macOS, iOS and Android. C++Builder combines the Visual Component Library and IDE written in Object Pascal with multiple C++ compilers. Most components developed in Delphi can be used in C++Builder with no or little modification, although the reverse is not true, but this constraint is valid only for source code. Binary code generated by Delphi can easily be linked to binary code generated by C++Builder and vice versa to generate an executable written in both Object Pascal and C++. With this approach, C++ can be called from Object Pascal and vice versa. Since both Delphi and C++ use the same back end linker, the debugger can single step from Delphi code into C++ transparently.

WebKit Web browser engine

WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as all the iOS web browsers. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, the Tizen mobile operating systems, and a browser included with the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. WebKit's C++ application programming interface (API) provides a set of classes to display Web content in windows, and implements browser features such as following links when clicked by the user, managing a back-forward list, and managing a history of pages recently visited.

OpenMAX, often shortened as "OMX", is a non-proprietary and royalty-free cross-platform set of C-language programming interfaces. It provides abstractions for routines that are especially useful for processing of audio, video, and still images. It is intended for low power and embedded system devices that need to efficiently process large amounts of multimedia data in predictable ways, such as video codecs, graphics libraries, and other functions for video, image, audio, voice and speech.

Maemo mobile operating system

Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK.

Adobe AIR cross-platform run-time system for building Rich Internet applications (RIA)

Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime system developed by Adobe Systems for building desktop applications and mobile applications, programmed using Adobe Animate, ActionScript and optionally Apache Flex. The runtime supports installable applications on Windows, OS X and mobile operating systems including Android, iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS. It also originally ran on Linux, but support was discontinued as of version 2.6 in 2011.

A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, 2-in-1 PCs or other mobile devices. While computers such as typical laptops are 'mobile', the operating systems usually used on them are not considered mobile ones, as they were originally designed for desktop computers that historically did not have or need specific mobile features. This distinction is becoming blurred in some newer operating systems that are hybrids made for both uses.

A mobile development framework is a software framework that is designed to support mobile app development. It is a software library that provides a fundamental structure to support the development of applications for a specific environment.

Apache Cordova free software framework for multiplatform hybrid mobile apps

Apache Cordova is a mobile application development framework created by Nitobi. Adobe Systems purchased Nitobi in 2011, rebranded it as PhoneGap, and later released an open source version of the software called Apache Cordova. Apache Cordova enables software programmers to build hybrid web applications for mobile devices using CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript, instead of relying on platform-specific APIs like those in Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. It enables wrapping up of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code depending upon the platform of the device. It extends the features of HTML and JavaScript to work with the device. The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly native mobile application nor purely Web-based. Mixing native and hybrid code snippets has been possible since version 1.9.

Symbian Discontinued mobile operating system

Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. Symbian was originally developed as a Proprietary software OS for PDAs in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS is a descendant of Psion's EPOC, and was released exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was also prevalent in Japan by brands including Fujitsu, Sharp and Mitsubishi. As a pioneer that established the smartphone industry, it was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010—at a time when smartphones were in limited use—when it was overtaken by iOS and Android. It was notably not as popular in North America.

Firefox OS mobile operating system written by Mozilla

Firefox OS is a discontinued open-source operating system – made for smartphones, tablet computers and smart TVs – designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on the rendering engine of the Firefox web browser, Gecko, and on the Linux kernel. It was first commercially released in 2013.

Mono (software) computer software project

Mono is a free and open-source project to create an Ecma standard-compliant .NET Framework-compatible software framework, including a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Originally by Ximian, it was later acquired by Novell, and is now being led by Xamarin, a subsidiary of Microsoft and the .NET Foundation. The stated purpose of Mono is not only to be able to run Microsoft .NET applications cross-platform, but also to bring better development tools to Linux developers. Mono can be run on many software systems including Android, most Linux distributions, BSD, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and even some game consoles such as PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360.

Access (company) company

ACCESS CO., LTD., founded in April 1979 and incorporated in February 1984 in Tokyo, Japan, by Arakawa Toru and Kamada Tomihisa, is a company providing a variety of software for connected and mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, video game consoles and set top boxes.

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, Google Fuchsia and the web from a single codebase.

Genode free software

Genode is a free and open-source operating system framework consisting of a microkernel abstraction layer and a collection of userspace components. The framework is notable as one of the few open-source operating systems not derived from a proprietary OS, such as Unix. The characteristic design philosophy is that a small trusted computing base is of primary concern in a security-oriented OS.

References

  1. ↑ "Reference design targets Linux mobile phones". Linuxdevices.com\date= August 7, 2007. Archived from the original on March 3, 2009.
  2. ↑ "Access Linux Platform on Display at 3GSM". Engadget . February 12, 2007. Archived from the original on December 6, 2012.
  3. ↑ "Access Linux Platform at LinuxWorld SF". Palminfocenter.com. August 20, 2006. Archived from the original on February 9, 2014.
  4. ↑ "Access and PalmSource Announce the Access Linux Platform". Access/PalmSource press release . February 14, 2006. Archived from the original on September 1, 2013.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  5. ↑ "Access Releases Access Linux Platform PDK and SDK to Licensees and Developers". Access press release . February 12, 2007. Archived from the original on September 1, 2013.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  6. ↑ "Edelweiss". Edelweiss-mobile.com. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
  7. ↑ Kairer, Ryan (October 13, 2008). "Review of the Edelweiss mobile phone at Palm Infocenter". Palminfocenter.com. Archived from the original on October 4, 2013. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
  8. ↑ Keilhack, Kris (September 19, 2009). "ALP-powered Emblaze Edelweiss shelved in favor of Monolith?". PalmInfocenter.
  9. ↑ "The First Else (aka The Monolith)". Archived from the original on December 6, 2013.
  10. ↑ "The Monolith Project". Emblaze Mobile. Archived from the original on March 3, 2011. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
  11. ↑ Ricker, Thomas. "RIP: Emblaze kills First Else". Engadget. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013.
  12. ↑ "Access". Archived from the original on July 1, 2014. Retrieved August 10, 2014.
  13. ↑ "Zen of Palm". Accessdevnet.com. June 13, 2003. Archived from the original on March 10, 2013. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
  14. ↑ New Access Linux Platform Screenshots, Mobilelinuxinfo.com, August 9, 2007. Archived January 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  15. ↑ "Framework aims to commercialize mobile Linux apps". Archived from the original on June 3, 2009., Linuxdevices.com, December 22, 2006.
  16. ↑ Access Releases Hiker Application Framework to Open Source Community, Access press release, December 12, 2006. Archived February 5, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  17. ↑ "P-03C". Japanese Wikipedia.
  18. ↑ "P-05C". Japanese Wikipedia.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.