Porting of Flashlite Player to Qtopia Phone Editions under the Linux Environment
Calsoft Labs’s expertise in porting Flash Player to embedded systems on various operating systems enables the client to meet their technical and time-to-market objectives.
Company
The Client is a leading provider of software technology for mobile handset devices & wireless mobile devices. The OS is Linux and GUI Environment is QTOPIA-2.2 phone edition.
Challenge
The requirement of the client was to port the standalone version of Flashlite Player to their Linux OS with Qtopia-2.2 phone edition.
The task was to port Linux version of Flashlite Player to the client’s Qtopia-2.2 phone edition UI environment. Even though the OS was same (Linux), the UI layer required lot of changes because the standard Linux version of the Flashlite Player uses GTK as the UI which is very different from the Qtopia-2.2 edition being used in the client’s target environment.
Solution
The client invited Calsoft Labs to port Flashlite Player onto their device based on Calsoft Labs’s expertise in porting the product. Calsoft Labs’s engineering team had to come up with the first version of the ported flash player in less than 10 weeks time.
A team consisting of a Project Manager, Project Leader, and a senior architect was assigned for this task. The first release was ready in less than two months. And the final release on was delivered in 3 months time.
The team faced lot of challenges especially in the Qtopia-2.2 phone edition UI Environment. The first challenge was getting assimilated to the client’s H/W. As this was only the prototype that has been provided for the porting, the OS software and the UI software had to be fine tuned based on the proto H/W. With some good support from the client, Calsoft Labs was able to integrate the first version of the Flashlite Player into the client’s H/W.
The next challenge was to integrate the Flashlite Player into the Qtopia environment as an application. Some finetuning had to be done especially for the audio handling which is quite different from the normal GTK environment. The major challenge was to pause the audio/video when there was an incoming call in the mobile device and then resume playing once the call has been completed. These involved a lot of context switching from one application to another and at the same time keeping track of the Flash Player’s context for resumption. This task was accomplished in a minimum time frame and that too on a prototype device by simulating calls from an external PC.
Then the Automated Test Suite (ATS) was run on the developed Flash Player and all the issues identified during the testing were fixed. Along with the Flashlite Player deliverable, Calsoft Labs submitted the test results to Adobe for certification of the ported Flashlite Player.
Result
With the Calsoft Labs team taking up the porting of Flash Player development work, the client was able to focus on his Mobile device OS level implementations which allowed them to showcase the end product in much less time. Timely delivery of the software enabled the client to meet his business goals as well. Feedback on the hardware prototype resulted in improvements to the hardware as well.
Benefits
Calsoft Labs’s expertise in Flash Player Porting development, offers many advantages to the equipment vendors.
- High quality development skills on a variety of Operating Systems
- Quick turn around
- Lower cost of development
- Guaranteed support