Hi,
Do I understand you correctly that the plan is to provide
a Wikipedia app for symbian and S40? (S40 and Symbian don't
have much in common, except that they are both one of the few platforms
left which still support J2me).
I agree that this is a good idea, as both still have a pretty high market share.
To give a number: Nokia store has 11 million downloads a day,
probably mostly from Symbian and S40.
Is it already decided that j2me is used for implementation?
For Symbian it's hardly a good idea to use j2me, therefore I assume
that S40 is the main target, and that symbian support is just a by-product.
That's a pitty, because I believe that it would be worth to provide a
"real"
symbian app as well. (Some more details follow further down)
Furthermore, I'm neither convinced that J2ME is the best approach for S40:
The main challenge is probably just the basic reading functionality. To my knowledge
there is no easy way to display web content within a J2me-app. I am not sure whether
there a third party components which could be used here.
In addition is the S40 browser proxy based (Similar to opera mini). Therefore a
J2ME, which
does not use the proxy, could potentially have a worse performance than just
accessing the
wikipedia with the browser.
An alternative (probably the only one) is to write it as a S40 web app [1].
Benefit is that (at least basic reading)
is much less effort, and that proxy can be used. There are also some major
drawbacks, i.p. persistent storage is not
supported, thus bookmarks/(persistent) history is not possible without storing
data on a server.
Therefore I'm not sure right now whether s40 web app or j2me is the better
approach, but I think
it's worth considering this in more detail, if this has not yet been done. web
app may require
skipping some features, while for J2me there is some risk that the effort turns
out to be too high
for developing a usable app.
Regarding symbian, as mentioned, I'd love to see an official wikipedia app for
this platform.
Actually I did some first trials [2] porting the official wikipedia app
using an inofficial phonegap qt port [3].
(The official phonegap version for symbian is basically unusable) .
First result were promising, but I did not develop this further.
However, if Wikimedia is interested in porting the wikipedia app to symbian,
I could look into this in more detail.
Best regards,
Christian
[1]
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Series_40/Series_40_web_apps/
[2]
https://github.com/cip/Wikipedia/tree/symbian
[3]
https://github.com/Viras-/cordova-qt/