Followers of the Forum Nokia Developer Discussion Boards saw interesting pre-announcements last month:

Nokia has ported MySQL and PHP to Symbian.

With 165 million cumulative Symbian smartphones shipped since the formation of Symbian and currently 134 Symbian smartphone models commercially available, it would be interesting to see the effects on the 8,134 third-party Symbian applications commercially available by what Nokia calls “PAMP”.

Availability is planned for next month, at the CCNC 2008 (Fifth IEEE Consumer Communications &Networking Conference, 10 - 12 January 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada).

Johan Wikman of Nokia, who has already ported the Apache web server to Nokia S60, writes in a Forum Nokia thread (emphasis mine):

I can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.

PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP, so yes, the full LAMP stack will be made available for S60 smart phones. In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf.

Yes, a fair amount of memory is needed and it’s still pretty experimental stuff, but it runs quite nicely on E90.

So, if you are in the neighbourhood, join us in Las Vegas

Johan

Richard Bloor comments in Symbian Blogs (again, emphasis mine):

At first sight this may seem like an example of porting just to prove it can be done. It does, however, have the potential to create a whole new way of looking at Web application. For example, I’ve recently been evaluating a number of GTD applications. Several of these use PHP and MySQL and it will be interesting to see if they work on PAMP.

As such PAMP could add yet another option for developers to create S60 applications and create a new paradigm for the “off-line” Web. Hopefully by January I’ll have an S60 device with the memory to run this baby.

Sources:

• Symbian Fast Facts: http://www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html
• CCNC 2008: http://www.ieee-ccnc.org/2008/
• Nokia Research Center, Mobile Web Server: http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/
• PHP running on Mobile Web Server: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102803
• Getting Things Done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTD, applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_GTD_software#Tools_and_Techniques
• S60 blogs: http://blogs.s60.com/mws/2007/11/hot_news_php_coming_to_s60.html
• Symbian Blogs / Richard Bloor, “Your S60 Web server gets a boost”: http://www.symbianone.com/content/view/5064/

Perhaps its time for me to upgrade my phone?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 8:01 and is filed under Connectors, MySQL, Use cases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.