QNX Software Systems Ltd. and Espial Group Inc. are planning a marketing alliance that will allow them to provide consumer appliance manufacturers with a PersonalJava solution for set-top boxes, Web phones, PDAs, hand-held computers, and a variety of other net devices.
The Java-based solution includes a suite of visual design tools, user interface components, platform products, product APIs, PIM capabilities, and Internet applications, including Espial Escape, currently the world’s smallest full-featured PersonalJava Web browser.
Espial applications are small and memory-efficient, and are designed to handle the myriad of visual displays and input devices typical of information appliances. Applications include Espial Escape, a full-featured Web browser with a footprint of less than 175K; Ebox, the e-mail client; and Espial Assistant, a complete PIM with an address book, calendar and an appointment manager.
Espial Escape, the Web browser, has zoom features for various screen sizes, adds support for JavaScript, SSL, applets and printing. It can be extended to support various media types, markup languages (XML, WML, VoxML, etc.), and scripting languages. Future versions will include support for HTML 4.0, DHTML, and XML languages.
Appliance manufacturers have total control over their device’s look and feel, since Espial provides:
- Kalos Espresso – A 100% Pure Java certified toolkit with a small memory footprint and support for diverse visual displays
- Kalos Architect – A layout-based user interface builder for consumer devices; features include onscreen consumer-device layering, JDK1.1 and PersonalJava-compliant code generation and synchronization, portable user-interface file formats for easier collaborative development, and support for creating applets, applications, and reusable components