By Rachel Chalmers
Oracle Corp has previewed Project Panama, a server that delivers existing static and dynamic internet content to any internet device. A prototype has already been deployed by Telia, the largest mobile operator in Scandinavia. Oracle reasons that there are two exploding markets. One is, obviously, the internet, but the other is wireless telephony. There are 300 million mobile phone users in the world today. In some countries people with mobile phones have no use for land lines at all. Oracle believes that Project Panama could triple the number of users on the internet.
The problem is presentation. All the content that’s out there on the internet today has been designed for viewing on PCs with large screens, explains VP of mobile and embedded products Denise Leahy. To provide phones, PDAs and other wireless devices with access to web-based applications, you have to rewrite all your web content to fit that form factor, Leahy says. What we’re doing with Project Panama is making this much easier for developers.
Project Panama will be based on XML with Oracle 8i on the back end. It should work by translating HTML into XML and then transforms XML into wireless markup language (WML), tagged text markup language (TTML) or whatever markup language is running on the device. All this should be automatic, but Oracle acknowledges the need for occasional human intervention. Service providers – the main market for Project Panama – will be provided with a toolkit so they can review and tweak the way a web application appears on a wireless device.
While Oracle did join the Wireless Application Protocol Forum in January, This is a lot more than WAP, said Lahey. It should also do more than rivals planned by Palm Computing and the Microsoft-Qualcomm WirelessKnowledge initiative. Palm requires manual rewriting of content, WirelessKnowledge only works for Windows CE and WAP is focused on protocol conversion. By contrast, Project Panama is designed to work at the application layer, automatically. What’s more, as well as being able to convert static content, it’s built to handle the most complicated web services up to and including secure transactions.
For example, Telia’s pilot in Gothenburg, Sweden, handles stock quotes as well as aggregating information from global positioning systems located on buses. This is for the benefit of elderly passengers, who need no longer wait in the cold for buses that have been delayed. As wireless devices become ever more pervasive, Leahy envisages more and more such web-based applications becoming available to ordinary people. Project Panama, she says, has the potential to revolutionize how these devices are used.
