Open development/Maemo roadmap/Fremantle

Fremantle is the codename of the Maemo 5 release. It comes after Maemo 4.1 (Diablo) and before Harmattan.

Fremantle timeline
This is a timeline based on known events and announcements. Many dates are quite flexible at this point.


 * 2008-06-01: "Fremantle" codename announced in LinuxTag 2008. See maemo LinuxTag update.
 * 2008-09-17: First annoucements in OSiM World: OSiM News: What's up with Maemo? (Ari Jaaksi, Head of Maemo Software @ Nokia) & Get ready for 2009!OSiM World 2008 (Erkko Anttila, Maemo SW Fremantle product manager, and Quim Gil, Maemo SW open source advocate).
 * 2008-09-19: More announcements in the Maemo Summit 2008 - Summary: What can we get out of Fremantle (slides) (video), by Peter Schneider (Maemo SW head of product marketing)
 * 2008-12-08: First pre-alpha SDK and first report on API changes. Suitable for platform development only.
 * 2009-01-29: Second pre-alpha SDK with Media Application Framework and more new platform components.
 * 2009-02-08: Maemo for Beagle board presented at FOSDEM.

Expected:
 * Plan for a mature alpha SDK with new Hildon application framework and API freeze available around February 2009.
 * Bossa conference in March. Maemo activities tbd.
 * Beta SDK released between March-May, ready for application development including support for Mozilla based browser and Greasemonkey add-ons.
 * Qt 4.4 "garage" support and Theme Maker by Urho Konttori planned to be ready by the beta SDK release.
 * Final release when ready. :)

New

 * OMAP3 support
 * HSPA/3G support
 * High definition camera support
 * OpenGL ES
 * Media Application Framework (Documentation, Ars Technica review)
 * Clutter
 * Meta Tracker (FOSDEM 2009 presentation, About the 0.6.90 release)
 * PulseAudio
 * GUPnP
 * OHM
 * upstart
 * A2DP & AVRCP support
 * OpenMAX
 * Improved power management for OMAP3.

See also the improvements done in open development.

Toolkit

 * New and updated Hildon/Gtk widgets.
 * Gtk 2.0 library upgraded to version 2.12
 * Glib upgraded to 2.16
 * Pango upgraded to 1.20
 * Cairo upgraded to 1.6.4
 * gcc upgraded to 4.2

UI Framework
Fremantle introduces a new UI framework which uses Clutter OpenGL library. It provides the following functionality:
 * Window manager
 * Task Launcher
 * Task switcher
 * Home view
 * Status menu and status area
 * New Hildon notification API for handling desktop notifications.

Media Application Framework
The Media Application Framework (MAFW) provides an open, flexible and extensible layer that eases the development of multimedia applications for the Maemo platform. It is a complement to the Multimedia framework that has been heavily improved in Fremantle. MAFW provides:


 * An extendable, pluggable framework interface, which allows to develop new plugins that provide integration with new multimedia services or rendering engines, that can be seamlessly integrated in all MAFW based applications.
 * Easy to use APIs that speed up application developing, providing support for playback control, discovery and browsing of multimedia resources and playlist manipulation.
 * Independence of the technology. Since MAFW is a plugin based framework, it is not tied to a particular multimedia technology (GStreamer,MPlayer, Tracker). Plugin developers have freedom to choose the technologies they want to use in their plugins, and application developers do not need to know about them.

The revamped Media Player will be based on this framework, allowing the possibility for third party developers to create integrated media applications and plugins integrating web services. Application developers are encouraged to look at the documentation and the example application provided in the SDK.

Data management
Tracker introduced to replace libmetalayer.

BlueZ
BlueZ updated to version 4.x. Brings along a major redesign of the D-Bus API and local bluetooth service framework. The main benefit of this change is decreased code complexity both on the BlueZ and the application side due to a much simpler API.

osso-gwconnect
Removed since identical functionality has been a part of Bluez core since Chinook.

Samba
Samba support to be dropped.

ClinkC
ClinkC deprecated in favour of GUPnP. The following main advantages have been identified to support this transition:
 * Designed specifically for Maemo.
 * Much simpler design/api compared to ClinkC or any other UPnP library.
 * Uses glib's main loop for waiting on sockets rather than launching several threads that adds lots of unneeded complexity and therefore introduces lots of hard-to-kill bugs.

Location framework
Changes tbd.

Multimedia

 * Gstreamer OpenMax wrapper on freedesktop.org.
 * New GStreamer plugin introduced that wraps openmax-il components under the gstreamer API.
 * OpenMax plugins for all the codecs.
 * No DSP sink and sources anymore.
 * esound replaced by libcanberra.
 * Speex introduced.
 * GUPnP introduced.

See http://www.slideshare.net/ensonic/maemo-multimedia-framework-presentation

System SW

 * initfs isn't used anymore
 * Device startup handled by Upstart instead of sysvinit. Location and format of init scripts differ.
 * OHM introduced as a policy framework mainly for audio in addition to dsme (now developed openly) and mce components, which are responsible for device state and mode control.
 * Profile API : A new client library (libprofile) and daemon (profiled) introduced for accessing profile settings.
 * Alarm API's updated: The number and functionality of API interface functions remains roughly the same as before. The usage (parameters passed) and underlying transfer protocol (dbus messages) are changed substantially.
 * BusyBox (now developed openly) updated to 1.10.2 (or newer?).

SDK

 * GCC updated to 4.x. Stricter checks for C and C++ code.

RTCom

 * Farsight API break: Farsight upgraded/re-written to farsight2.
 * Telepathy: libtelepathy outdated. Use telepathy-glib instead.
 * Evolution-data-server dropped.
 * libgalago and galago-daemon dropped.

Window manager
Window manager upgraded to matchbox-window-manager-2