Movial brings browser-based UI kit to LiMo

The mobile Linux company Movial officially joined the LiMo Foundation on Monday, bringing with it its toolkit for creating browser-based user interfaces.

Movial was one of the companies involved in the LiPS Forum, a group that was dedicated to developing mobile Linux standards. However, since LiPS decided to fold its activities into the more commercially minded LiMo Foundation — an industry group that is building a shared, Linux-based middleware implementation — companies including Movial have been migrating over to the surviving organisation.

Movial's toolkit, the Browser D-Bus Bridge, will be open-sourced within the next 90 days, according to Movial's president, Tomi Rauste. The bridge translates JavaScript and HTML commands into Desktop Bus (D-Bus) commands, which LiMo already uses to let applications and services talk to each other. The bridge, therefore, makes it possible for an application to launch services, such as media engines or instant-messaging engines, via a browser-based user interface (UI).

Rauste told ZDNet.co.uk last Tuesday that the browser-based UI approach would be attractive to operators, as it makes it easier and quicker for them to put their own services, such as online music stores or location-based services, onto handsets.

"For example, when you play a song in the media player, you can easily integrate that application to the operator's online music store, which can then collect information from the internet relating to that song," said Rauste. He suggested that this sort of approach was more attractive to operators than that offered by the Google-led Android platform, because Google has its own services to offer.

"Operators aren't interested in giving one of their core businesses to Google," Rauste said.