TransVirtual scored some funding and announced its XOE device
platform, a commerical implementation of its PocketLinux
distribution:
"According to company founder Tim Wilkinson, "XOE is
the commercial implementation of PocketLinux." Unlike PocketLinux
and the Kaffe VM, XOE will completely offered as open source
software but will instead be licensed by Transvirtual to OEMs
manufacturing devices. However, Wilkinson says the company plans to
release much of XOE to the open source community under the GNU
General Public License (GPL). According to Wilkinson, XOE
technology is covered by several patents. "However, all the APIs
will be fully published and fully open, so there is nothing to
prevent competitors from implementing compatible software," he
adds.
Tony Fader, Transvirtual's VP of Marketing, portrays the
advantages of XOE this way: "Basically, Java used to be an applet
delivery platform -- but it was constrained to the frame that it
was delivered in. What we've done with XOE is to expand that frame
all the way out to the edge of the device. As a result, instead of
developers writing applications to the Java or AWT APIs, we make it
possible for them to write in familiar XML, xhtml, and html -- the
language of the Web." According to Fader, "you can easily convert
between iMODE (a sort of Japanese version of WAP) and html because
the entire front end of the virtual machine is based on XML
technology."
