Technologies

SyncML - Synchronisation Markup Language

For years we think that synchronisation of data between different devices (computers, PDAs, cellphones etc.) is of great importance. (we posted first thoughts about this in 1994 on usenet, these documents are still available here

Now, the "evernet" is the new buzzword (meaning the wireless internet, available everywhere and everytime) and with it the belief that synchronisation is not needed because we'll be "always online", always connected to the central server.

However, we believe that "always online" is a big temptation, but not a sustainable solution. All highly complex systems (e.g. in biology) are based on a equilibrium of autonomy and communication. With "always online", autonomy disappears, and "always online" also means "always vulnerable FROM the net".
This is why we think that intelligent synchronisation (which is, at last, a kind of communication that increases autonomy of the participants) is very important.

With SyncML, in early 2000 an initiative to develop a platform independet standard for synchronisation was founded by major players in IT and mobile equipment industries. In the first half of 2001 first devices equipped with SyncML have reached the market, (e.g. Nokia Communicator 9210 or mobiles from Ericsson like T39m, T68, R520m and T65)).

We think that SyncML is a very promising initiative and have therefore joined SyncML as a Supporter already in early 2000. At this time, the focus of SyncML was on synchronisation of contact and calendar information, however, the architecture of SyncML is not limited at all and can be used as base for almost any synchronisation task. In addition, SyncML is independent of the transport media.

Synthesis has developed his own efficient, platform independent SyncML framework in C++.
Our SyncML products Synthesis Sync Server and Synthesis Sync Clients for PDAs and Desktop are based on this framework.

The Synthesis Sync Server / Client are compliant SyncML products, which is easily customizable for different datatypes, databases and transport environments. An SDK (Software Development Kit) can be provided to connect customer specific adapters, written in C/C++ or Java.
Using the SyncML framework, we can provide efficiently SyncML server and client solutions adapted to the customers specifications (see Services).

XML - eXtensible Markup Language

XML ist a description language allowing to store complex data structures in a simple and logical way as text. But XML is not a limited format, but can be eXtended. XML, together with XSL, might be the sucessor of HTML in the internet, and will also gain importance as storage format for office applications.

We are using XML right now when we need to store structured data in a document. This is a common case in many applications, often out of direct context of the internet. So, we use XML sometimes unnoticed by the user of our software. But as soon as the document needs to be imported or converted by some other software application, XML is a big advantage - there are many tools ready for editing, printing and converting XML based data.

Projects

OS-9 Emulation "os9exec"

This is now an Open Source project (under GPL) available at SourceForge. OS9exec allows running user-mode programs for the industrial OS-9 RTOS on MacOS, Win32 or Linux systems. See here for details.