New Nokia WRT Plugins
Last week I was invited to Nokia to learn about today’s announcements regarding extended tools support for the web runtime (WRT). There are now plug-ins for Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Visual Studio and Aptana Studio.
I was curious as to why Nokia chose these IDEs rather than Carbide. After all, Carbide is free while the first two of these tools imply a cost for developers. Also, the kind of people I see developing widgets are more likely (but not exclusively) to be hobbyist programmers. I was told that Nokia are actually targeting web developers and these three development environments represent 90% of the web IDE market. The idea is to leverage web development skills to allow developers to easily create S60 widgets.
I asked about future support for additional phone features. WRT already allows access to Calendar, Contacts, Logs, Messaging (SMS and MMS), location system information and sensors. I was told that WRT is still being developed and additional features will become available.
Personally, I think WRT lacks some features that prevent it being used instead of many native applications. In terms of applications I have worked on these include detecting more phone events and simple reading/writing to files.
As I observed last October, Nokia have actually quietly relaxed platform security on latest phones (S60 3.2 and later) to allow WRT widgets (and I assume Flash and Python) to be able to access what were protected (contacts and location) features. I was curious as to whether this relaxing of protection might continue. Nokia were unable to comment on this but have promised to get back to me.
I also asked whether any thought has been put into encrypting the widget source (HTML) code. Companies are less likely to want to create widgets if they can easily be copied or sensitive information or URLs so easily disclosed. I gained no indication that Nokia are putting work into this area. For now, I recommend obfuscating the source if you wish to hide your implementation and this will provide a limited form of protection. Looking at this more positively, it’s possible for new widget authors to view the source of any existing widget. This might help the developer take-up of the WRT.
I was also told that WRT will eventually be included as part of the Symbian Foundation source. Additional information about Nokia WRT plug-ins for Aptana Studio, Visual Studio, and the Nokia WRT Dreamweaver extension can be found at Forum Nokia.
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