Nokia 770 development options... Flash?

For some time now I’m looking into building rich internet applications using Flash. I’m very impressed by Flex 2 and did some adventures in developing with it. Flex 2 is still alpha and targets the new Flash version 8.5. Now I have a Nokia 770 device, and the Flash version on it is 6.0.82.0.

I’m also looking into how applications can be developed for the Nokia 770 (yes, I’m a busy man without much focus;-) ). I installed the C/C++ development environment, but I actually don’t want to go back to C/C++ development with all its difficulties. Other options are Mono and Python which I’m also currently invesigating.

Today I was at the first day of first European Flash conference http://www.sparkeurope.com/. There was a very interesting session on the open source community for Flash.One of the sessions was by Edwin van Rijkom on Screenweaver, an open source project for building Rich Desktop Applications. He is wrapping Flash in a host application and provides access to the host OS and native code on the host OS through the Screenweaver host application. Because the Nokia 770 also has Flash installed I was dreaming about the possibility to create such a host application for Flash that provides access to all Nokia 770 features and the possibility to hook it into the Nokia 770 menu structure. I discussed this idea with Edwin and he thought that it would be a great idea.

I searched for people who tried such an approach on linux. I ended up on a blog post by Darron Shall who created a C# host for Flash, wasn’t happy with it and searched for a more cross platform approach. He looked into XulRunner to host the Flash application. I just looked into this approach, but I’m afraid that running XulRunner on the Nokia 770 would be to havy. The runtime is big, and on top of that you get the additional Flash runtime which is something like 1.5 Mb as well. Way to much for creating small apps for the 770.

It would be great if a really small Flash hoster could be created for the Nokia 770. I think Flash is a great platform for creating applications. Maybe someone did already something in this direction? If this is the case, please let us know!

Published Wednesday, November 16, 2005 10:23 PM by svdoever
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Comments

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 5:14 PM by Eugene Bekker

# Have you looked at Laszlo?

This doesn't really solve your hosting problem, but OpenLaszlo.org is similar in concept to Flex, but it can target Flash 6, 7, and 8 (and it's open source). There's an Eclipse plugin from IBM for a Laszlo IDE.

I recently have been thinking about the same idea, using Flash as the development platform for the N770 because I too would rather not "downgrade" to C/C++ development.

But since there isn't a readily available stand-alone runner that gives you system access, I pretty much gave up on the idea. But if hosting the flash player is simple enough, then the idea might still be possible.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 5:35 PM by Serge van den Oever [Macaw]

# re: Nokia 770 development options... Flash?

I looked at OpenLaslo, but there are some things that I have against it:
- Complete buy-in into their way of building flash apps
- I want to do SOAP, bu don't want their server, is not possible
- They still use ActionScript 1, I will NEVER go there! I want a type safe language. The new development done on haXe (http://www.haXe.org) looks interesting with respect to this: ActionScript 3 like language for Flash 6,7,8,8.5. Saw a presentation on it today!

if there is a goof Flash projector that gives access to OS we would be in business!
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 11:21 PM by Eugene Bekker

# Have you looked at Laszlo?

Well, let me preface, I'm not a Flash developer so I'm not completely familiar with some of the details of the diff capabilities with each version.

But in response to your beefs with Laszlo, I think you're pby referring to an older version. The current stable release is 3.0, and 3.1rc2 is out now, soon to be production. Between these two releases, they have added what's known as SOLO deployment which doesn't require the Laszlo server at all for deploying the finally compiled .SWF (unless you use a couple of advanced features).

Also, SOAP access is no problem, they have built in classes for SOAP, XML-RPC, and JavaRPC support, and they're pretty straight-forward Event driven. They even have an XMLHTTPRequest object for AJAX support.

As far as ActionScript, I don't really know about that, I didn't think that the JavaScript in Laszlo was exposing the underlying AS but I guess that makes sense. Not sure what version of AS it supports now, but I know they did make it more formally correct with ECMAScript compliance. There is true class inheritence and so for, I didn't check if it has type safety at compile-time though.

In any case, back to the original point, after doing some more surfing around and checking the support pages for Flash on Linux on Macromedia's site, I kinda get the feeling it will be a challenge into itself to get an adequate host for flash on the 770, so I'm pby going to fall back to the GTK/Hildon approach.

Friday, December 16, 2005 10:44 AM by Patrick Thomas

# re: Nokia 770 development options... Flash?

> If this is the case, please let us know!

Yes, definitely let us know, especially if it runs full-screen (but not required :-). Amazing they did not think about providing this at launch but probably too excited about their mameo cathedral. Who in his right mind will invest serious-$ into the mameo ramp-up for some admittedly very cool device with unproven mass market appeal, let alone any hint of "market share"? Same thing happened to Tapwave with their Zodiac (on top of PalmOS being dead). Just have Nokia spend 2% of "their" mameo effort into offering decent, stand-alone Flash (or even Realbasic) support for quick RAD / demo development.

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