Is there any information available on the core architecture of the Firefox OS? I don't mean developer-facing information only. I am interested in the underlying architecture similar to that of Android available here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/how-android-works-the-big-picture/515
It is mainly Gonk (underlying linux kernel), Gecko (Firefox engine) and Gaia (user interface). On the Mozilla wiki you can find the full info on these layers; Mozilla wiki
In few words, Firefox OS is an environment where running HTML5-based applications (not only the mark-up language but all associated technologies including JavaScript, CSS3, web APIs...).
These applications run on an special browser called Gecko. You can consider Gecko as a Firefox with steroids with applications replacing web pages. In some aspects it lacks of some browser functionality but it implements a lot of APIs to provide a safe access to the devices.
Gecko is supported by the actual SO, Gonk. Gonk is a very simple distribution of GNU/Linux and it holds the Hardware Abstraction Layer or HAL placed between the device hardware and Gecko. Gonk translates low level hardware access to C++ interfaces and Gecko offers these interfaces to developers in form of JavaScript standard APIs.
More info in Mozilla Wiki
The main Firefox OS architecture is
Application (Gaia)
Platform (Gecko)
Infrastructure (Gonk)
There's a Overview and High Level Architecture slide(english) from Firefox OS AppDay in Spanish that elaborate the Architecture more concisely.
Check out the below link for full Firefox OS architecture along with security information:
Click here
On MDN you'll find a very similar image that explains exactly how Firefox OS works:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Platform/Architecture
Related
KaiOS is "a web-based mobile operating system that is based on Linux kernel forked from B2G (Boot to Gecko), an open source community-driven successor of Firefox OS which was discontinued by Mozilla in 2016. (As written on its Wikipedia Article)
I wanted to use Unity Game Engine to make a game for it but I have not seen KaiOS as one of the available platforms to build for.
Is it possible that one of the platforms that Unity builds for (such as HTML5) can be made somehow compatible for KaiOS? Are there any other available tools I can use? Or will I have to work on the raw game from scratch?
The answer is no:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityCloudBuildSupportedPlatforms.html
Sorry to be a let down. It does support iOS though.
EDIT
If you put a little more work into it using HTML5, then yes.
I have searched the web but couldn't find any detailed idea about Native OS development I need to know about Native OS development in detail eg. what is a Native OS what kind of feature it gives.. etc etc..
"Native OS" is not a product. It is a phrase that describes the operating system that the device comes with, and applications written specifically for that OS (as opposed to Java apps, which are cross-platform).
So for example, "Native OS" of iPhone is iOS; and "Native OS iPhone application" will be written in Objective C. On the other hand, e.g. a JavaScript application running on iPhone is not native, because a Javascript application is running through a browser and not directly on the OS.
Another example: On a Windows machine, the native OS is (obviously) MS Windows. C++ applications using Windows API are native; Flash or TCL/TK would be non-native.
If you prefer native OS you should specify what exactly it is, like Windows, Linux... etc. :)
Though we can develop the i-phone application in the X-code
Why we need to use the Airplay-sdk?
can anybody differentiate between them?
I use Airplay SDK (see www.immortalcode.com) and it works well. Their code has been evolving, but it is pretty solid now. The big advantage for me is to be able to keep my source code in C++, and to be able to use a single code base for multiple platforms. I have built multiplatform games (iPhone, Android, bada, Windows) all from Visual Studio on Windows. The main caveat with Airplay SDK is that you may not get access to all the functionality you would normally have on a given platform. In particular, you probably won't get the native UI look and feel, and you may not have important options like using the ad provider of your choice. My understanding is that they've recently made strides in opening up the full range of native APIs on iPhone and Android, but still I think there will likely be problems when it comes to certain highly platform dependent stuff. Again, working with certain ad providers comes to mind as the main example.
You don't need to use the AirPlay SDK. You can write an iPhone app without it.
Airplay is a cross platform development solution allowing you to write applications for iOS, Android and other smart phone and tablet devices.
It differs from Xcode in that Xcode is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with support for writing (mainly, but not only) Mac OS and iOS applications.
Airplay is a Software Development Kit (SDK). It is not in itself an IDE. You still need to use an IDE in order to write applications, and it appears that Airplay works with both Visual Studio on Windows and Xcode on Mac OS X.
It appears that Airplay uses C++ as it's main language, providing access to iOS APIs through a wrapper of some kind. It also appears to have its own UI library, meaning your app will look the same on all devices, but not the same as other apps written natively for each respective platform.
Airplay SDK is a C/C++ programming environment that supports multiple mobile platforms. It consists of several wrappers to native libraries for various mobile OSes and consoles ( Iphone, Android and Symbian amongst them ) and of a cross compiler ( gcc under the covers ) that integrates with Visual studio ( on Windows) and Xcode ( on Mac ). The wrappers provide an uniform programming interface among all supported operative systems. Basically you develop on your desktop and then you deploy on multiple platforms with a single click. The SDK is fair complete covering 3D and 2D graphics, a basic UI framework, sound and resource managment facilities for example. The main drawback is that multithread is not supported and that it may be problematic to use native features of a given OS. Also the GUI system doesn't provide out of the box the same elegance and look and feel one can found on the Iphone or Android. On Android, Iphone and Windows there is an extension mechaninms that allows one to link native libraries. I am using it to develop a 2d platform with Iphone and Android as the main targets. I found that the programming model proposed by Airplay suits a videogame very well but it may be inconvenient for GUI-heavy applications. However the framework is extremely solid and works well and I haven't found bugs so the code is well tested. If you are planning to develop a multi-platform game you should definitely give it a try. If you need to have more control on what happens under the covers and you would like to use native features I would also consider COCOS2D-X (http://www.cocos2d-x.org/) as an alternative.
The project is still immature and has a few bugs but I have tried it and I found it extremely promising. Moreover you have full source code: if you find a bug or need an extension you are free to provide your own solution.
Marmalade / AirPlay SDK will be providing access to native UI's in a forthcoming release. Check out their road map at http://www.madewithmarmalade.com/marmalade/releases-and-roadmap
I want to develop an application which runs on iPhone / Android / Windows Phone 7 smartphones and is able to recognize a marker and place augmented reality content on it.
Is there any common framework which I could use for that task?
This is probably the closest you'll get:
http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wiki/index.php?FrontPage.en
Not sure about Android or iPhone, but Kevin Marshall has done some proof-of-concept work on Windows Phone 7. You should keep in mind though, that augmented reality on WP7 requires access to camera APIs that are not publicly available and as such any AR application on WP7 would not be available officially through the Marketplace. Device manfacturers (such as LG) have access to these APIs, which is how some AR applications already exist for WP7.
As Derek and Stefan point out, it appears that there are ports of the ARToolKit augmented reality framework for all three platforms.
On iPhone, you can see this in the VRToolkit sample application by Benjamin Loulier, which leverages the enhanced ARToolKitPlus library.
For Android, it looks like NyARToolkit is available, with this sample application (as pointed out by Stefan).
Finally, it looks like SLARToolKit is used in the Windows Phone 7 sample application here (as pointed out by Derek).
Be aware that this toolkit and its derivatives are licensed under the GPL:
IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING YOUR RIGHT
TO USE ARTOOLKIT:
ARToolKit is made available freely for
non-commercial use under the GNU
General Public License. Commercial
licenses to a professional
implementation of ARToolKit are
available for users for whom the GPL
is not suitable, or who require a
higher level of support, or who
require customization or other
specialist modifictions. Commercial
licenses are administered by
ARToolworks, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA.
I've seen people violating this license in their applications and derivative frameworks, so it's something to be aware of.
Did you check Layar?
AFAIK they do not support WP7 but I guess it's a matter of time.
I'm in the middle of development of a client-server "socializing" that is supposed to run on several mobile devices. The project is pretty complex, involving networking, exchanging media, using geolocation services, and nice user UI.
In terms of development efforts, technical risks and extensibility what is the best platform to start with? Taking into the account that the goal is go "live" as fast as possible with the mobile version. And second goal is to cover most users (but first is more important).
iPhone (iPod iPad)
Android
BlackBerry
Java ME,
Symbian
I realize that there are limitations on every platform, and there are different aspects to take into the account (for example iPhone has better developer's community then Android, J2ME runs in a terrible sandbox but covers most devices).
Please share your pros and cons. I have the experience only with J2ME, unfortunately I can't evaluate other platforms.
If you're looking at native applications on the platforms you list, then the development effort required in order from least to most is:
iPhone
Android
Blackberry
Java ME
Symbian
Development effort is largely governed by language/libraries, tooling and fragmentation. Hence iPhone wins (good language & libraries, excellent tooling, little/no fragmentation). Symbian comes last (C++ with limited libraries, poor tools, large fragmentation). Android beats Blackberry on libraries and fragmentation, and Blackberry beats Java ME on fragmentation.
The counterpoint to this is market size, especially among your target user base - Java ME reaches far more devices than any other platform, whereas the Android installed base is still the smallest of the 5.
There's no one right answer, but if reach is important then Java is a good place to start, if time-to-market and user experience are the keys then iPhone makes sense.
It's also worth looking at how easy/difficult it would be to port across to other platforms. There are various cross-platform libraries around such as Airplay or J2ME Polish that might reduce the costs - provided you can implement your application on the cross-platform part.
I'd like to speak up for Maemo/Meego(Nokia's/Intel's mobile Linux). While it is in a state of transition and currently Maemo 5 has only one good phone(and a couple of cheap Chinese ones), but I feel that it will soon be big(I like many people believe that Meego will be Nokia's high end strategy and Nokia is the biggest phone maker in the world). Plus the N900 is the coolest phone around.
Also their it basically an open Linux device (pretty similar to standard desktop Linux). The ide QT Creator is great and cross-platform(comes with embedded visual designer and nice documentation broser) but you don't have to use it, there is some support for using your own text editor or ide.
There is no sort of signing key nonsense(I did a student project for the blackberry and have been quite annoyed by keys). Other things I didn't like about the blackberry: windows only eclipse plugins, our team had a lot of trouble figuring out how to add third party libraries to blackberry COD archives . Also some of the Classes are somewhat sparse in a lot of ways especially String/Char, probably since its ME based, I also didn't like the file read/write apis, it felt somewhat awkward, possibly since blackberry apps only recently got the ability to store files(before you could only store/retrieve objects to disk via the persistence layer)..
The preferred Languages are (Gobject C currently but less so for Meego) , Qt flavoured C++ and python. There libraries are nice and the qt ones are especially well documented. Since its a tiny linux box you can have on device debugging (there is also an emulator).
Note I haven't developed anything for Maemo/Meego but I've read a lot about and just fell in love.
I think that the best solution might be to start with a smartphone optimized web site. A native app can provide a richer interface, but a well designed web app can come close and will run on any device.
Have a look at the WPTouch for an example of a very good phone optimized web site.
In line with Roman A. Taycher, I'd like to raise my voice for windows Mobile/Windows Phone. It's has a large installed base, it has the tried and true Visual Studio toolset to develop with, it has the best emulator of them all (it actually emulates the ARM instruction set - you hear that, Apple?), and you can leverage your Win32 experience.
MS-haters - please don't bother responding. I've heard them all.
A cross-platform runtime such as Qt or HTML5 are good bets and are portable.
Qt supports many platforms including Symbian, Meego, Linux, Windows etc. It is highly regarded as one of the best programming frameworks around currently.
Qt creator is also a very highly regarded IDE.
HTML can be accessed on nearly everything of course and can there are plethora of tools out there.
While applications natively developed for a given platform typically win in terms of platform UI consistency and performance, you could try going for one of the available multi-platform frameworks, such as Rhodes (just to name one). Personally, I do not have any specific experience with Rhodes and only learned about it a couple of days ago (having a closer look is still on my todo list), so please judge the user experience that the framework offers on different devices on your own.
It sounds like you need Mobile Community Framework (MCF). It is cross-platform framework to develop network-centric, location- and proximity-aware applications on all modern smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, WinMo - almost all you mentioned, except J2ME). It provide native binaries for all these platforms. With MCF development time can be reduced, as you don't need to code all this network stuff by yourself, but you can just use simple API to send any amounts of data across enrypted connections, via Wi-Fi ad-hoc mode or via special proxy-server.
More info at http://www.uvamobiltec.com.