Opensourcer targets Windows Phone 7 hopefuls

An open-source database company hopes to strike it big with developers on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, officially launched next Monday.

McObject has announced a one-time charge per developer of $395 with free distribution of its Perst .NET object-oriented database on consumer phones running Windows Phone 7. Usually, McObject charges a $500 commercial license plus a run-time price according to the number of devices, as explained here.

McObject said it has also temporarily slashed the Perst .NET server licensing fee by 38 per cent to $495 for developers building RIAs using Silverlight on PCs and other devices.

The company said it wants to stimulate development of rich-internet applications using Microsoft's Silverlight media player on phones and PCs by making Perst .NET more economical and convenient for programmers.

Windows Phone 7 will rely on Silverlight to juice phones' graphics.

Phones will draw on Silverlight for high-quality video and audio using different codecs and Microsoft's IIS Smooth Streaming, Deep Zoom to really drill into photos, and support for vector and bitmap graphics. Also, Silverlight can access phones' hardware acceleration for video and graphics, camera, and microphone, along with the flagship feature of multi-touch.

Perst looks like it's the only database for this first generation of Windows Phone 7 phones that'll actually be able to store data used by non-Microsoft apps.

Microsoft is keeping Windows Phone 7 firmly locked down by making the resident copy of SQL Server Compact Edition only available for use by applications built by Microsoft

It's among a set of restrictions on Windows Phone 7 designed to avoid crashes. Other restrictions include the fact that applications won't be allowed to talk to each other or run in the background.

Despite the restrictions, Microsoft has warmly welcomed Perst .NET for Windows Phone 7, calling it "epic".

Perst .NET, licensed under GPL, provides a complete relational database for mobile and RIA applications with ACID compatibly and features such as B-tree, R-tree, KD-tree, API, garbage collection, and full-text search. In June McObject announced its support for Perst .Net which was ported to Windows Phone 7 by consultant APPA Mundi.

Versions of Perst are available for Java 2 Micro Edition on the Blackberry and for Google's Android.