As mentioned, OPL on the Series 60 is improving on a daily basis. Ewan has been looking at the wider picture, and what tools and techniques are going to be needed in the future to help he new OPL user (and make it a lot easier for us old-timers). To this end he's put together a Discussion Paper on one way forward. It has been reviewed by a few of the OPL Team, and it is now available for public discussion.
From the source code point of view, the opl-dev project contains the C++ code for:
* OPLT, the OPL translator, which converts OPL programs to .OPO files
* OPLR, the OPL runtime. This loads and runs the .OPO executables
* OPX, several OPL extensions, for accessing Symbian OS subsystems e.g. comms
* TEXTED, the OPL editor. This is the app most OPL developers will see.
* OPLTOOLS, a set of PC-based development utilities.
* DEMOOPL, the example app which demonstrates OPL features.
* OPLDOCS, some porting guide info
* OPLRSS, a script for driving the resource compiler for OPL programs
All this is held in one source codeline, with compiler conditional flags (for example, #ifdef __SERIES60_) building the code for one type of device where appropriate. There's more info about controlling the build in a 'readme.txt' file in the source package.
What's missing?
Lots of functionality for the S60 OPLR. Things like menus, dialogs, t9 interaction.
TEXTED for Series60. This is a major piece of work which hasn't started yet
And lots of the OPXs haven't been tested on S60.
Looks like I'll mostly be documenting the opl-dev project stuff here. And why not, it's good to be able to write some of this stuff down.
Many people are familiar with OPL, some from the Psion PDAs, others from the organisers from which the language orignated. These people both know what OPL is and what it does. Now with the movement of OPL to the new breed of Symbian devices, especially smartphones, a new group of users to learn to program and use OPL applications. This short article is to outline what OPL is for, the benefits of using it and how it can help you create apps for a smartphone.
OPL first made its appearance on the Psion Organiser II in 1984. Before OPL, all programs for Psion's machines had to be written in assembler using a PC development kit, requiring the developer to have a good, in-depth knowledge of programming.