Andreas Constantinou wrote:
> Nick,
>
> You can think of the following as good-enough approximations:
>
> BREW is similar to Trolltech Qtopia, S60, MOAP (plus UI), China MobileSoft
> stack (now part of ALP), Pollex stack, and GTK+ with GStreamer
> Symbian OS is similar to Montavista Linux, Wind River OS
>
> OS = manages filesystem, memory, I/O hardware, process/task scheduling,
> events management, communications (GSM/CDMA/3G)
> Middleware = multimedia framework, PIM engines, messaging engines, Java VM
> UI = widget libraries, windows management, Flash/SVG engine
>
> Microsoft, ALP, A la Mobile, Purple Labs, Maemo = OS + Middleware + UI
>
> Andreas
>
>
One of the bigger, more successful OS projects in Japan was the TRON
Project headed by Prof Sakamura of the University of Tokyo. As I know
it, most Japanese consumer electronics and most Docomo phones (once upon
a time) used to run some variant of ITRON which was one of the outcomes
of this project.
I would be keen to find out if the "T-Engine Project" which is the
successor to the TRON Project is involved in any way. It would make
sense to standardize on the platform - and in this regard, the TE
Project has been quietly rolling on and is gaining some level of
acceptance in Japan as far as I know. Also, the TE Project was started
with the vision of establishing a common execution environment for the
creation and distribution of middleware (which includes everything from
DSP stacks to PIM to UI to network stacks, etc.) across a wide range of
processors and environments.
More info is on the TE Website at http://www.t-engine.org/ or at my own
(plug coming up) website at www.onghu.com/te (plug done)
Either way, the T-Engine is a based on a hard real-time kernel that is
available in source but without the licensing restrictions that GPL
imposes. Also, it has about 5 years of lead on this KDDI OS project
(KDDI is also a member of the TE Forum) and has 20 years of legacy in
the form of the TRON background. Of course, the Japanese companies
involved in this effort (Sanyo, Toshiba, KDDI) are all members of the TE
Forum (but then, so are another 450 companies!)
While there may be no link between the T-Engine and the KDDI OS project,
it would be interesting to see where this heads :D
On the other hand, this may just be KDDI's way of countering the Docomo
effort to standardize a Linux API which (to quote the article) is
"mostly a Japanese-flavored crew, dominated by NTT DoCoMo and its key
suppliers NEC, Panasonic and the Korean giant Samsung. But Motorola,
whose official phone strategy appears to be "we'll try anything", is
also one of the founding five."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/15/linux_phone_api/
Cheers
Mohit.
Received on Tue Jul 25 11:10:16 2006