Ideaworks3D announced that its Airplay native execution environment has been certified as a conformant implementation of the OpenKODE 1.0 API standard from the Khronos Group. The Airplay OpenKODE implementation has been certified as conformant on Symbian OS, BREW, Windows Mobile and mobile Linux. In addition, the Airplay desktop simulator environments, running Windows x86 code or simulating ARM code using ARM's Real-Time System Model debugger are also conformant.

    OpenKODE reduces mobile platform fragmentation by providing the OpenKODE Core cross-platform API for accessing operating system resources, and a media architecture for portable access to advanced mixed graphics acceleration. Designed to speed deployment across multiple software environments and hardware architectures, Airplay is a cross-platform portability technology and run-time execution environment that delivers a single application binary across all ARM-based mobile devices. The Airplay 3.5 SDK, which includes OpenKODE 1.0 support, is available immediately for evaluation from Ideaworks3D.

    This is by far the widest range of platforms available from one implementation of OpenKODE today. Furthermore, the Airplay implementation of OpenKODE is unique in offering developers a single native application binary that can be deployed unmodified to all supported platforms. Ideaworks3D believes that, as an open industry standard which is independent of platform vendors' proprietary APIs, OpenKODE will encourage the growth in development of native mobile games and multimedia applications.

    "Ideaworks3D's real-world experience with Airplay has been invaluable in guiding the detailed design of the OpenKODE Core specification. Now that Ideaworks3D has certified that Airplay is OpenKODE-conformant across so many platforms, we expect developers to be strongly attracted by the proposition of using an industry-standard API to deploy rich-media applications to an enormous number of handsets, all from a single application binary," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and chairman of the OpenKODE working group.

    The resulting application can be deployed over-the-air to multiple operating systems and run-time environments without further porting or any requirement for additional graphics rendering engines on the mobile device. OpenKODE also includes the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting applications between Linux, Rex/Brew, Symbian, Windows and RTOS-based platforms. OpenKODE Core will be familiar to POSIX and C programmers and is a small and light abstraction layer that provides access to lowlevel operating system functionality. An OpenKODE Core implementation is typically less than 100KB in size and adds very minimal performance overhead. OpenKODE Core provides advanced functionality, such as multi-threading under an event-driven architecture, while being carefully designed to provide real-world portability to a wide variety of mobile platforms.

    By supporting the OpenKODE 1.0 API, Airplay gains the advantages of an industry-standard API, allowing OpenKODE content developed on Airplay to be easily ported to other OpenKODE implementations, and allowing applications developed on other OpenKODE implementations to be ported to Airplay. All the traditional advantages of Airplay are available to OpenKODE; zero additional porting effort between all supported platforms and handsets, and true native performance unencumbered by any kind of Virtual Machine.