Symbian Operating System

As a part of our Mobile Computing curriculum, we had case studies on several mobile Operating Systems like the Symbian Operating System, Windows CE and the Palm Operating System.

Our faculty encouraged us to explore these topics and present them to our other class-mates so that we get a lot more exposure to the subject.

Thrilled by the fact that the Symbian Operating System is an open-source mobile Operating System, I decided to take up the topic. I put a little effort into understanding the Symbian Operating System. It was exciting to find out my phone (Nokia N73) had the Symbian Operating system and I took an opportunity to tweak around with it.

I also planned a few live demos emphasizing application development on the Symbian Operating System with the help of programming languages like Java and Symbian C++.

With the support from the faculty of my college, a session covering the Symbian Operating System, along with J2ME development on it was presented on 27th October.

The presentation covered the following topics -

• Introduction to Symbian Operating System
• A Brief History of Symbian Operating System
• Symbian Foundation
• Features of Symbian Operating System
• Operating System Architecture
• Memory Management
• Threading and Security
• Application Development In Symbian OS

The presentation was followed by two live demos covering -

• Symbian C++
• Java 2 Micro Edition

The session concluded with a quick comparison of Symbian C++ and Java ME and how an application can leverage the benefits of the languages when developing an application.

As the target audience for the presentation was primarily the final year students, we had around 40 students participating in the presentation.

At the end we provided a link to the NetBeans website to encourage them to download the latest version of NetBeans along with the mobility pack so that they can go deeper into developing J2ME mobile applications.

Check out the photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/osum.source/SymbianOperatingSystem#

A Linux Workshop

Recently the faculty of my college along with the support of the students organized a Linux workshop. The workshop focused on the basics of the Linux operating system. The workshop was held for two consecutive days in which the students learnt a lot about the fundamentals of Linux.

The workshop was organized on 23^rd and 24^th October.

The workshop was conducted by Mr. Ahmad Jabas, a PhD scholar of our college. He emphasized various concepts of Linux with the help of the Debian Operating System.

Virtualization was also covered as a part of the workshop with the help of VirtualBox. There was a live demonstration where the Debian Operating System was installed on VirtualBox.

Here is a quick overview of the various activities that were covered in the two days -

Day 1

Topics covered -

• Introduction to Linux
• Origin of the Linux Operating System
• History of the Linux Operating System
• The GNU Project and Source Code Freedom
• Linux Philosophy
• Linux Installation
• A comparison of the Linux Operating System and the Windows Operating System
• UNIX/Linux commands

Day 2

Topics covered -

• Virtualization
• Virtual Machines
• System Virtual Machines
• Process Virtual Machines
• Full Virtualization
• Applications of VMs
• VirtualBox
• Linux Installation on VirtualBox
• Shell Scripting

Various demonstrations were given which included several concepts like -

• Stand-alone installation of Debian
• VirtualBox installation of Debian
• Linux commands
• Shell Scripting

The workshop was very inspirational and several attendees installed the Linux Operating System on their computers and started working with it.

There were about 65 students who attended the workshop both the days.

Oracle Forms

I recently gave a presentation on "Oracle Forms" - a feature of the Oracle developer suite which helps GUI designers to quickly design screens to facilitate easy insertion, deletion, update and query of tables in a database.

The third years were asked to learn about Oracle forms for their final examination. I decided to take this opportunity to talk about it.

Oracle Forms runs on Java containers and the GUI is presented in the form of Java applets to the user. The Java container is known as "Oracle Container for Java (OC4J)" in the Oracle Forms architecture.

The presentation was given on 21st October which was followed by a live demo which emphasized how an Oracle form is created and how is it run with the help of Java containers.

The presentation covered the following topics -

• Introduction to Oracle Forms
• Oracle Forms Architecture
• Single Block Forms
• Master Detail Forms
• List Of Values
• Non-base table fields
• Triggers
• Troubleshooting

The presentation was followed by live demos covering -

• Single Block Forms
• Master Detail Forms
• List Of Values

The session concluded with emphasize on technologies like JSPs, Servlets, JDBC, etc. which are swiftly replacing Oracle Forms because of their customizability.

As the target audience for the presentation was primarily the third year students, we had around 40 students participating in the presentation.

Check out the photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/osum.source/OracleForms#