Experiences in portable mobile application development

In the software world portability means power. The more operating environments you can support out of the same code tree means more potential users for your software. If done right, additional platforms can be supported with little extra maintenance cost. If done wrong, maintaining additional platforms will become a veritable nightmare. This paper describes experiences undergone when creating truly portable soft- ware. Our software is a real time rendered 3D map and messaging application, which runs on UNIX (Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD), Windows 98/2000/XP, Windows CE and Symbian Series 60. It is Symbian which makes this mix of platforms interesting and challenging. However, with the knowledge of potential problems, we found that this set of platforms is totally manageable for a portable mobile 3D application. 1st International Workshop on Advanced Software Engineering: Expanding the Frontiers of Software Technology - Session 4: Experiences in Software Development Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI)