Scripting on the Windows Mobile platform

By Mike Riley, Submitted Monday, March 5, 2007

Being an occasional application developer, I look for ways to optimize my computing world and try to leverage what Iâ€™ve already written on one platform and with very few modifications, make it run on another. Open source scripting languages like Perl and Python have been in my toolbox from the beginning and I have used the conversions of these languages occasionally on the Pocket PC platform. What Iâ€™d really like to try is Ruby but unfortunately only a very poor conversion of this language exists and is not actively maintained. A proprietary scripting language Iâ€™ve had great success with on the Windows Mobile platform is a language designed by Carl Sassenrath called REBOL (www.rebol.com), which stands for Relative Expression Based Object Language. This interpreted language consists of incredibly easy syntax, a relatively small binary runtime, support for all the major Internet communication protocols and a dedicated user community. And while the site lists Windows CE 2.0 as its most recent Windows Mobile conversion (http://www.rebol.com/downloads/core155.zip), that version runs perfectly well on my Pocket PC.

As Microsoft continues to enhance the Windows Mobile platform, it would be nice to see them port something like the Windows Shell (formerly codenamed Monad) to have a compact equivalent just as they did with .NET and the Compact .NET frameworks. What portable scripting languages have you used to enhance your mobile computing experience?

Submitted by Werner Ruotsalainen on March 5, 2007 - 6:29am.

What portable scripting languages have you used to enhance your mobile computing experience? Mostly nScripm - it's really powerful and makes it possible to implement missing functionality on the platform. It's also portable - the same script runs on many platforms. Finally, it's C-like, which is also a big plus.

I also recommend searching the PPCMag blog for nScripm - you'll find a lot of practical examples where it proved useful in everyday Windows Mobile practice.

Submitted by Mike Riley on October 20, 2007 - 5:34am.

Thanks for your comments and useful link, Nick. I agree that Rebol is a very cool language but the one thing that bugs me is that it isn't open source. I hope that once Carl Sassenrath, Rebol's progenitor, decides his company has made what he feels is the most from the commercial success of the language that he eventually donates it to the open source community so it can finally attain the respectable attention and buzz that it deserves.