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Comments: In-reply-to Mark Hindess <mark.hindess@googlemail.com>
   message dated "Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:31:10 +0100."
From: Mark Hindess <mark.hindess@googlemail.com>
To: dev@harmony.apache.org
Subject: Re: Palm Pre's WebOS includes Harmony 
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Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:23:42 +0100


In message <200906240831.n5O8VB0r020325@d06av01.portsmouth.uk.ibm.com>,
Mark Hindess writes:
> 
> In message <f982cec50906240047v5edfe645yb5fa10b37579c611@mail.gmail.com>,
> Yang Paulex writes:
> >
> > FYI.
> > 
> > This is probably old, but I just know that - actually
> > Palm Pre's Linux based WebOS includes Harmony library
> > and a Harmony compatible VM called oasisharmonyvm...
> > (http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/06/palm-pre-webos.html)
> >
> > I'm a big fan of Palm devices, so this is really good news to
> > me. May we looking forward the combo of Linux+Harmony rules the
> > smart phone market ? :)
> 
> This was news to me too.
>
> Very cool.  Looks like they took code from the M4 release revision in
> Dec 2007.  I wonder if they'll be updating or joining us on the list?
> Regardless, it is great to see someone else using Harmony.
>
> I wonder who made the VM?  I'm guessing it might be:
> 
>   http://www.oasistechsol.com/
> 
> based only on googling arm, oasis and java.

My guess was completely wrong.

I was a little bit curious[0] so I did a bit of googling and found out a
bit more about the use of Harmony on that platform.

I emailed the author of the blog entry.  He kindly sent me the output
of "ipkg info" for the three packages with "harmony" in the name.  This
told me that the harmony package (which contains the class libraries) is
dependent on openssl and libcrypto which means they've probably written
a security implementation that uses that.  This is very cool and I would
love to hear more about this!

It also gave the architecture as armv7 which is what I expected from
reading general documentation about the Palm.  I also read some blogs
about the SDK on the web[1].  This appears to be based on an x86
virtual machine so I assume the oasisharmonyvm has been ported to both
armv7 and x86.

A little more googling turned up [2] which says:

  root@castle:/usr/bin# javahy --help
  OasisVM: Build 96.2
  Copyright 2005, Iventor, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The copyright year is a little puzzling, as is the fact that the web
server for iventor.com seems to return only 404 errors.  We can see a
version from a couple of years ago[3].  Turns out this company was
founded by Paul Mercer presumeably after his previous company[4] was
acquired by Sun.

More googling turned up some mentions of symbols containing "drlvm" in
the Oasis VM (time Jun 12 18:35:21 in these IRC logs[5]).  There are
also some diffs for revisions of the Palm webOS which might provide a
clue as to what bits of classlib have been used[6] - though obviously
this doesn't show unchanged files.

If any Pre developers are reading, thanks for choosing to make use of
Apache Harmony and congratulations for creating a cool device.  I'm
sure I'm not the only one who would very much like to know more about
your experiences with Harmony - in particular with respect to openssl,
working with the VMI and creating a Harmony-compatible VM.  It would
be great to hear from you on this list.  That said, I respect your
decision if you choose not to do so.

Regards,
 Mark.

[0] I intended to buy one but they aren't available in the UK yet and
I need a new phone quite badly.  Rumour has it that the Samsung i7500
Galaxy (which is Android-based) comes out tomorrow and the issue tracker
item for Perl scripting on Android was closed last week so I might not
be able to resist.

[1] http://www.newlc.com/node/23199

[2] http://randomfoo.net/sandbox/palmpre/java.txt

[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20070627131755/www.iventor.com/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo

[5] http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/webos-internals/webos-internals.20090613.txt

[6] http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/WebOS_Doctor_version_1.1.0