Cross posting to reach a larger audience.
We've gotten word from the Global Development group that a lot of our partners are asking for an official Symbian S40 J2ME app for Wikipedia. Before talking to any potential development houses I wanted to reach out to both of these lists to see if anyone has a lead on any open source developers who would want to contract for a project like this and/or volunteer with us.
The feature set would be fairly basic including but not limited to
* Reading articles * Bookmarks * History * Interwiki links
Now developing for J2ME is a beast unto itself as Derk-Jan https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32700#c1 points out but the potential install base of these phones is still fairly large making it a good strategic goal. We'd love to do this in PhoneGap but its support starts at S60 and not S40.
I see two Symbian based apps here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Mobile_access#Symbian_applications but their both just for offline reading
Curious to hear peoples thought/experiences.
--tomasz
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/
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