Ewan's Musings

My "OPL Wiki" Entry

Rafe has set up an OPL Wiki (an editable by everyone type of website) that is going to be used as the central resource for OPL Documentation. One page is a 'personal page' about me, and I thought what I wrote there should be posted here as well.

Rafe has been known, on many occassion to refer to me as:

“A mad kilt wearing Scotsman who is the worlds biggest OPL evangelist."

I'm not going to dispute that at all – and the fact that I have felt, for a long time, that OPL on the Symbian OS platform is the 'missing link.' Since the dawn of time (okay, the first Psion Organiser) OPL has been present, allowing the regular user to create small and useful programs. Some of those programs have evolved to be commercial quality (Al Richey, of RMR Software, built an entire software empire on OPL and his need for a 'simple' bank accounts program on his Series 3a). Many of those users on the Series 3a who wrote their first apps in OPL joined Psion, then Symbian, and have contributed heavily to the latest versions of Symbian OS.

Now, with Symbian OS about to be delivered into the hands of tens of millions of people in Series 60 handsets (not forgetting UIQ and the Communicators), where can those users go to create the small applications that drive 'personal' computing?

Python, Perl, Javascript and Flash may all be good options, but OPL has an incredibly shallow learning curve, requires minimal system resources (I'd go as far as saying that it needs less than the J2ME MIDP device profile) and it's already here. Almost.

That's why I continue to push OPL as being 100% relevant to mobile computing today. And part of that means creating good online documentation – the whole purpose of this Wiki. I hope that you find it useful.