Case Studies look at users of OPL, how they use OPL, what they think of the language and what difference it has made to their lives. To start with, we caught up with Steve Litchfield to ask him for his thoughts on OPL.
How did you get started in OPL?
Essentially I came from a BASIC/FORTRAN background in industry, looking for a palmtop computer to keep me busy on holiday (sad man) and finding the Psion Series 3 had a high level programming language that I could get to grips with was a major discovery.
Why is OPL still a popular language to use?
OPL hasn't changed that much over the years. For determined 'beginners' like myself, the same OPL code that worked on the old Series 3 will by and large work on the Series 7, and even on the Symbian 6 Nokia 92xx series. There have been lots of detailed improvements and extensions over the years, of course, to allow for larger, colour and touch sensitive screens, and to provide a better database model, but almost 90% of the OPL code for Fairway on the 9210 is identical to the code used in the Series 3a version back in 1995.
How long did your last OPL project take you?
All OPL source code for Fairway was written on the Psion/Nokia itself and the conversion from a Series 5mx version to a Nokia 9210 version took much less than a man week, over half of which was messing around with creating colour versions of all the graphics!
Any final thoughts?
All of which is a testament to the power of OPL from its inception and to the way it can be picked up and used very quickly to produce professional applications.
Steve, thanks for taking the time to talk tous. You can find Steve's apps on the 3-Lib website, along with some useful tutorials on OPL.
Posted by Ewan at April 20, 2003 10:22 AM