Richard: Wirelexsoft is a new company, what brought it into the wireless IDE space?

Mosley: We founded Wirelexsoft in 2002 specifically to address the wireless market. The founders, while coming from diverse backgrounds, all have wireless handheld device experience. We realized that the market for wireless IDEs offered an opportunity to move the tools to the next generation, to tools employing graphical software development. Most of today's tools, those from the big players, are text based.

What we mean by next generation are tools where the developer does not type code, but rather uses objects from a palette to paint the application. These are what we call interface objects and they are specific to the platform the developer is working on. With these objects the developers construct an application by dragging and dropping from a palette. So the IDE becomes a graphical editor.

This is what the VistaMax product line is about and our first product addresses visual development for the Series 60 Platform, so developers can now create applications without having to manually write a single line of code.

We are not in direct competition with existing software tools providers, we have moved software development to a new generation, a graphical based generation. In creating these tools I think we are ahead of the market and we are receiving some very encouraging feed back those who have evaluated our product, they are really excited about it.

Richard: What were your reason for implementing VistaMax for the Series 60 Platform first?

Mosley: We chose the Series 60 Platform because it is one of the most popular platforms in the smartphone market. However, we are not focusing solely on the Series 60 Platform, Series 60 is just the first platform we have provided drag and drop capabilities for. We have several other platforms either in or nearing beta testing including: UIQ, J2ME, and Maemo. These will all have the same graphical based development capabilities. But Series 60 was the best platform on which to demonstrate the capabilities of our technology.

Richard: Beyond drag and drop are there any other features to VistaMax which differentiate it for existing tools?

Mosley: There certainly are. Take our application sheet. This allows developers to view liberally hundreds of screens is one place. Think about modern applications, they need to be multinational, and one problem this creates is localization. Very often developers create a version in one language, test it and then try to localize it. More often than not they find problems, it takes days to review all the screens, find all the issues and then retest for multiple languages.

With the application sheet localizations are driven from a spreadsheet and can be switched with a mouse click. With a novel "Preview" feature, a developer can quickly see all the issues created by a localization on all the applications screens. We believe this could shrink development of man-machine interface (MMI) from months to weeks.

We can take this a stage further. In these screen the components by themselves are static, although they obviously have the platform code behind them. However, we can create event links to give these screens an element of dynamic behavior. From my previous experience with handset development this is a big feature that developers will appreciate. I believe it will cut their development time to 10% or even less compared to the conventional approach.

We also recognize that applications are often developed by different teams, so we have a concept of a primary and a secondary application sheet. So if a developer has teams working in different parts of the world they set up the primary application sheet in their main location and provide secondary application sheets to their offices. The changes can be merged at any time, but each developer can work without affecting anybody else's work.

Richard: Does VistaMax include debugging in an emulator or on a device?

Mosley: We are working hard on adding a debugger to VistaMax. One important thing to bear in mind is that we don't provide the compilers, developers are able to choose which one they want to use. VistaMax can be configured easily to work their chosen compiler.

Richard: Who are you targeting this tool at?

Mosley: We plan on offering three product lines, targeted at different sectors of the development community.

VistaMax IDE, the graphical IDE is basically targeted at any application developer, be that a third party software developer, enterprise developer or someone creating platform applications.

We then have the VistaMax framework, which is the set of tools we use to implement a platform within VistaMax. This will allow platform developers to create drag and drop development for their own unique APIs. The VistaMax Framework can also go deeper, not just creating applications, it can be used to enhance the platform itself.

Finally we are in the process of developing a number of connectors to backend services, based also on the drag and drop capabilities. With these connectors developers will be able to connect their application to a database and then do whatever searches or data updates they need. The target for this technology is very much the enterprise developer.

Richard: How is VistaMax licensed?

Mosley: We have a multi-tier licensing scheme. In term of pricing we are in the process of finalizing product prices. We will certainly try to be as competitive as possible and plan also to pay special attention to academic user.

Richard: How important has Eclipse been to allowing you to delivery this technology?

Mosley: Basing the tool on Eclipse obviously made developing it easier for us. It meant we did not have to start from scratch, Eclipse is something of an industry standard, so that gave us a head start.

The Eclipse Project also works in a collaborative way, which may mean in the future other could help developing new interface objects, possibly new ideas for development, based on our tools. Eclipse means we are not working isolated from the market, rather we are part of the market.

Richard: Does that mean that drag and drop features of your solution are going to be open sourced as well?

Mosley: Not at the moment. It is our intellectual property and what makes our tools unique, but future is full of fantastic ideas and anything could happen.

More information on VistaMax can be found on Wirelexsoft's Web site at www.wirelexsoft.com. You can also see VistaMax in action on Stand 37 at the Smartphone Show.