When software giant Oracle Corporation acquired Sleepycat Software last year, company officials knew they were also gaining a product — Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB — that would be perfect for mobile devices running Symbian OS. But Oracle developers knew that porting Berkeley DB’s thousands of lines of C code to a new OS could be a challenge. The solution came from Nokia’s Open C plug-in for the S60 3rd Edition SDK. By providing a standard interface with pthreads and key POSIX functions, the Nokia kit saved Oracle about one-third of porting development effort. In fact, thanks to Nokia’s Open C plug-in, Oracle only needed to redesign fewer than 1,000 lines of code, and the entire porting process took only 10 man-days. The result: Berkeley DB’s simple key-value structure can now be used for a wide range of S60 applications, such as a message store for SMS, MMS, and mails; a contact or calendar database; and a multimedia store.
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