The wireless terminal software industry is currently facing a huge challenge: how to handle the ever growing complexity of mobile phone software whilst reducing development and maintenance cost, improving the time-to-market and maintaining the flexibility to introduce attractive and differentiated products.

Previous to the embedded software developers, other parts of the software industries have had to face a similar issue. The best technology answer was the component approach: by using independent isolated pieces of software, called components, interacting with the rest of the system by controlled mechanisms. Component based frameworks dramatically facilitate the management of software complexity and the sharing management of this complexity between a wide number of different actors with different expertise, to provide to the final customer a robust, flexible and open solution.

Implementing the component technology on an embedded system such as a mobile phone bears multiple challenges.

The first is performance. An embedded system can not afford performance loss due to the standard component based approach. Open-Plug has developed FlexibleWare™ technology with at its core the OP-Engine, which exposes via the SoftBus a highly efficient communication media to the components. The FlexibleWareTM technology allows to convert current embedded systems into component based system without any significant performance or memory footprint impact.

The second challenge is the coexistence with legacy code. The Mobile Phone Industry despite still young, is using hundreds of man-years worth of legacy code, often incorporated into highly complex functions like the wireless modem or a variety of specific hardware drivers. The FlexibleWareTM technology allowes to build component based systems which easily coexist with such legacy applications.