Monday, June 09, 2008

Mozilla Prism for maemo

It sounds like another buzz-word candidate on the internet field is the term "RIA": many big guys commercially interested on RIA seem to concept it differently. My understanding about the term stands on its origin: RIA are applications running of top of browsers essential features and infrastructure: connectivity, interoperability, cloud storage (data available anywhere, any time), responsiveness, and so on, and IMO this is what drives the real meaning of RIA or "Rich Internet Applications".

PS: To avoid ambiguity we are generally referring RIA by "web applications".

In that sense, the Mozilla Prism project was launched w/ the intention of "integrate web applications with the desktop, allowing them to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser". The project implements new concepts including "SSBs" and "distraction free browsers". Ok then, lets analyse what we have here from different perspectives:
  1. On the pc (w/ satisfactory processing capabilities), users can have their web browser w/ many tabs opened, their RIAs living each one on their own process and windows, as well as many other OS applications all at the same time and their PC are able to run great.
  2. But what about it all on the mobile space ? To be honest I am not really sure about the answer, *but* that is what this port job is mainly about: getting feedback about what maemo users get when they can somehow to integrate common WebApps (meebo.com, gmail, gdocs, gchat, ...) with their mobile desktop environment.
Although the TODO list is still big, the DONE list is accomplished so that it worth making "Prism to Maemo" project public.





1) Installation

While I am still having trouble to get my upload account to 'Maemo Extras" repository working fine, I've set up one living under my personal web dir: .install file here.


2) Warnings
  • I will be working on this more seriously from now on with guys (luckily on #prism - irc.mozilla.org) to see what features are really interesting to have available on the mobile/maemo space.
  • It is still an "under porting" work. so bugs are likely to be found and new releases are likely to appear.
  • .deb sizes 10Mb and installed it takes 30Mb on disk.

Hope you enjoy.

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com