Q. What is The Prosciutto Project?
A. The Prosciutto Project is defined around an open source, data-driven mobile application engine implemented in J2ME. You could think of it as a rapid application development framework, or a distributable mobile application engine that aims to address the problem of device fragmentation. The idea behind it is that of the use of a very basic markup language in order to define UI objects and behavior. The string representation (i.e., markup lanaguage) will be interpreted by Prosciutto in order to produce a graphical, on screen representation ("appearance") of each object defined, and with a specific behavior for each object as well.
Q. What's the spirit behind it?
A. If you are targetting a wide range of handsets, there's a 99% chance you are going to face
problems when porting your application to each different phone model / handset vendor. Ever wondered how much time it is
required to produce a quality delivery in software? If it's often taken as a 50/50 (50% design and coding, 50% testing),
when working with mobile phones it's more like 50/50/50 (50% design and coding, 50% testing, and yet another! 50% porting).
Even minor changes demand that your application be run on the handset testbed all over again to ensure some quality deliverables.
Prosciutto is envisioned as a mobile application engine that would be tested only once on every handset, and would be configurable enough as to run any kind of application on it.
Separate the business logic from the actual java code, model the business logic outside of it, make a very simple configuration language and have business process
analysts/modelers - not coders actually build the application.
Q. What can I do with it?
A. Anything you would do on a mobile application that has to do with browsing data is doable in The Prosciutto Project environment by using the mobile application engine (Prosciutto)
and a set of well-defined, serializable UI objects. This way, an entire application definition can be hosted on a web server, Prosciutto would fetch it
from the server, and yet be completely business logic agnostic. If your application changes, there's no need for the engine to be updated and redistributed (as long
as you don't need to use any newer core feature of course).
Q. Which phones are supported?
A. Prosciutto, the core engine of The Prosciutto Project, has been tested on a number of real devices and has already over 2 years of development / testing iterations
using the RERO (release early, release often) approach. Even if it's designed to work on ALL MIDP/CLDC devices, a list of tested handsets can be fond here.
Q. How is it licensed?
A. The Prosciutto Project is currently available under the GPL v3 license. For commercial licenses please contact me at marionetazorz at yahoo dot com.
Q. How can I contribute?
A. There are many ways to contribute with The Prosciutto Project. The easiest one is just use it, play with it and post any ideas, criticism and loas in the mailing list. Or you can write to me at marionetazorz at yahoo.com with subject "The Prosciutto Project - I want to contribute" with your ideas about how you feel you can contribute and I'll reply as soon as possible. Every skill is needed so any kind of skills and emails are very much appreciated
Q. What's the homepage for The Prosciutto Project?
A. The homepage is hosted here in the meantime.
Q. Where do I find the sourcecode?
A. The sourcecode repository is hosted at Assembla. The URL for the Subversion repository at Assembla is here: http://svn.assembla.com/svn/prosciutto. Just point your SVN client to this URL in order to download the latest trunk of the project, including demo projects.
Q. What's the roadmap for The Prosciutto Project?
A. We have many, really *many* ideas coming on for the project's roadmap, some of them are actually pulled because of necessity and some others we carry out because of joy ;).
In any case, we base our roadmap on features that we want to include in Prosciutto. Features have to be as open as possible to let the developers using Prosciutto actually make worthy applications.
Consistent features are grouped in milestones which we take care of by using Trac, a bugtracking and wiki tool seamlessly integrated with Subversion.
The URL for The Prosciutto Project Trac site at Assembla is here.
The project's roadmap is there as well.
Q. Do you have any tutorials?
A. A tutorial for Hello World and other applications is being built here. Beware it's under construction, I'm doing my best in order to have it completely finished and continue on newer, usable applications.
Q. Where can I find the documentation for Prosciutto?
A. The docs are packaged along with the source code in the form of Javadocs. You can find an online copy of the Javadocs here.
Q. Is there any mailing list?
A. Yes, you can subscribe to the Prosciutto Project Google group here. For discussions, the best chance you have is to subscribe and start/comment on any of the discussions forums we have here.
Q. Where can I find the latest news?
A. The latest news can always be found in my blog, though some of them might be seen in the discussion list first. Just stay tuned!
For you code lovers, the latest code can always be found at the SVN repo trunk ;)
About: The Prosciutto Project / Prosciutto is developed by Mario Zorz . If you want to contribute, feel free to write me at marionetazorz at yahoo dot com
