You might have noticed that this blog did not work anymore since a few days. This happened when SourceForge moved their MySQL servers to another location and the old servers stopped working. We now moved the posts on this blog to the new server. So everything is working again as you see.

We have made a roadmap for æther’s development. The roadmap shows what we plan to develop in each version, but we can’t tell you yet when these versions are planned to be released. This is mostly because we haven’t figured yet out how to do all these things. You will be reading future posts about those topics in future posts.

As we explained in “Dividing up æther”, æther will be roughly divided into two sections. First we will concentrate mostly on the back-end. The front-end will follow once we have a stable back-end. Although we plan to support lots and lots of different type of phones, we will be concentrating on Sony Ericsson phones first. The reason for that is that the current development team has the most experience with those phones.

Version 0.1

Version 0.2

Version 0.3

Version 0.4

Future versions

Æther will be roughly divided in two separated layers: a back-end and a front-end. The back-end will have all the stuff needed to communicate with the phone and the front-end will be the user interface (UI) which the ‘normal’ æther users will use. The back-end will not contain any UI stuff and will not be depended on any front-end. The front-end will use the back-end through a clearly defined interface or API.

This clear separation will make it possible for æther to have not one UI, but several. Like a fully featured graphical user interface (GUI) for our every day users, a command line user interface for the users who would like to use æther through Telnet or SSH or a small application which does a specific job like logging calls. And since æther will use .Net we could also have a GUI for Windows, one for Linux, one for MacOSX and one for your PDA. It will also make it possible for other people to use æther’s back-end in their own program!

This separation also has advantages while developing æther. The back-end and front-end(s) can be build separately. We can have a team working on the back-end and teams working on the front-end without them needing to get into each others work. Plus the back-end will probably be easier to compile, because it doesn’t have any UI in it.

The back-end will consist of functionality like communication, logging, various protocols and standards like OBEX, VCard and PDU and of course the phone plugins with the phone specific details. The front-end will have its own functionality like providing a UI for the back-end, scripting and various plugins. Details about both ends will follow in future posts.

In a previous post we talked about how æther needed to be written in a programming language many developers would know. That way it will be easier for developers to help out with the project and so help æther to grow bigger and bigger. It would also be nice if the compiler and maybe even the IDE are cheap to buy or even be free of charge.

After lots of thinking we came up with Microsoft .Net as the platform æther will be developed in. There are already lots of .Net programming languages and compilers so it enables the programmers to use their programming language of choice and yet mix the binaries with other .Net developers, so this perfectly fits our needs of enabling a big group of developers to help out with æther. Languages like C#, VB.Net, Delphi, J# and C++ have such compilers. C# is the official .Net language and looks a lot like C++ or Java. C# therefore is a language most people will be familiar with and that is why it will be the programming language the official code for æther will be written in. Plugins by other people can be developed in any .Net language they prefer since the .Net architecture allows them to link to each other even when written in another programming language.

.Net has another possible advantage in that the .Net program can be run on other platforms too. So æther could be run on not only Windows, but also Windows CE on your PDA, MacOSX, Linux, etc. More details on that in another post.

Microsoft offers a free commandline compiler of C# and a not free IDE in the form of Visual Studio, but there are other .Net capable IDEs out there like the C# personality of Delphi 2005 and the free and open-source SharpDevelop. The latter is lacking debugging support, though. We will use the Visual Studio IDE for æther because we think it is the most feature rich and used by a lot of developers around the world. Since SharpDevelop can import Visual Studio projects it will also be possible for developers to use that IDE if they prefer to use it.

Always wanted to know how æther is pronounced? Click here and find out.

We want æther to support as many different mobile phones as possible. This is harder than it sounds at first. Æther is an open source project, so we are not making profit from it. Owning lots of different phones is not something most æther team members can afford. In order to support lots of different phones we need lots of different people helping us. Because we do not want bother those people with all the other details of building a project like æther, we are going to have plugins. Phone Plugins so to say, one for each type of phone.

Anyone with some programming knowledge should be able to build such a plugin and directly use it in æther without much trouble. So we want æther also to be easy to use from a developer’s point of view. That means we need to make æther in a programming language that many developers would know and need to make sure the source is easy to compile without to much (3rd party) dependencies. We also want to make sure æther has a layered design. This makes it easier to replace a layer with another implementation without needing to change the other layers. This enables æther to have a very extendable design thanks to the plugins and the layered design. But more on those topics in the future. And last but not least: We need to have good documentation of how a developer can implement and build such a phone plugin for æther.

So æther would like to support any mobile phone already out there or that will be available in the future. We can not do this on our own, of course. So we make sure it will be easy for lots of developers to help us out and write phone plugins for æther that everyone can enjoy. We will let you know through this blog when and how you could help us out with that once we have finished the design and made a first implementation.

Now we know what this project æther is, why is this project named æther and what is æther anyway?

Ether is the substance once thought to fill all space. People once believed it was the medium through which radio waves traveled. Mobile phones of course use those radio waves to communicate. It is the reason why we call them mobile phones and not just phones. So you could also say that mobile phones use the ether to communicate through and that is why we thought ether would be a suitable name for this project. But there are other ways to spell ether, like aether and æther. The combined a and e would look really neat we thought, so we decided to write it like that. Of course writing it like aether is fine too. Especially when you do not have an æ button on your keyboard.

There are also other meanings to the word aether, like from the Greek mythology. There it means the personification of the sky or upper air. Mortals breathe air (aer) while gods breathe aether. And of course you also might know aether as the fifth element in philosophy. We think this all gives a nice touch to the word æther.

Æther (or aether) is a powerful and extensible tool to manage and use your mobile phone from a computer. It will allow you, for example, to send, receive and manage SMS messages, contacts and files. It is highly extensible so anyone can write a plugin for any type of phone. This allows the program to support many types of phones.

This sounds as if æther is already finished. Unfortunaly it is not. We have yet to start development and are now in the planning phase. In this weblog you will read about the decisions we make along the way and we will keep you posted through this weblog on any new developments. We hope to get some feedback from you along the way so we can keep making æther better and better. Stay tuned…