Mobile Wizardry, brainchild of Aaron Ardiri and other Palm OS game developers, has announced the release of SHARK, a multi-platform development kit for handheld devices.
Unlike prior attempts at achieving this goal (J2ME, AppForge, and CASL, among others), there is no bulky runtime to install, and SHARK is designed to play to the strengths of each platform it supports. Aaron describes it in a PalmInfocenter post as a BIOS abstraction layer. SHARK handles basic input and output, so it’s not a lowest common denominator attempt at a global UI library.
With the addition of libraries that will run on top of SHARK (already in development), there will also be common abstraction layers for database management, user interface, and high-level networking protocols like FTP and HTTP. The current release supports Palm OS, Pocket PC, Smartphone 2002, Symbian Series 60, and Windows, and more platforms are on the way.
Mobile Wizardry has already been using the platform to develop a new multi-platform game. Given that Mobile Wizardry’s focus is on games, and Aaron’s history of mercilessly pestering PalmSource to provide better support for games development in the Palm OS, I have no doubt that SHARK is as lean and fast as it can be. The sample apps on Mobile Wizardry’s page run very nicely on Windows and my CLIÉ NX70V, and they’re not hugely bloated application files, either.
I’ve got a couple of Palm OS development projects on the back burner that would really benefit from multi-platform releases, and this sounds like a great platform to toy with.
