Ray Rischpater: Scheme on the mobile phone. From the Scheme workshop at ICFP

Ray Rischpater gave an gratifying talk on what his company, RocketMobile Phone has done with Scheme on the mobile phone. They've done it with a port of TinyScheme.

It sounds like they wrote their own browser so that they can get access to things like the address book, the list of recent phone calls, etc. Probably GPS data too. They do this by serving WML-like pages to the browser that include Scheme between script tags. I'm interested in knowing why they chose the browser route. They were building their own client to interact with thier own server... is the browser model superior even for a single application, single server situation? I suppose a major factor was that they already had server-side infrastructure ready to go, including programmers that are accustomed to that model. And who knows, maybe they are reserving the option to dominate the wireless browser market for the glory of Scheme!

Question: are they sending WML to their browser when not sending blocks? It would seem so.



(Technorati Tags: icfp, scheme, lisp, wireless, rocketmobile, tinyscheme)