While the Adobe Acrobat portable document format has served the PC world well it has several disadvantages in addressing the portable document needs of the wireless world. PDF is a relatively heavyweight document format and although changes have been made, in the form of PDF Tags, the document information is relatively unstructured, which places a processing requirement on the client to render complex graphic or reformat the document to a flowed output.

Cerience was formed in 2000 when Lynn Formanek, currently Cerience’s President, identified the need for a better portable document solution for the small screen of a handheld. “I went on a long bike trip and used a handheld for my communications,” explained Formanek. “I wanted to access my email and the attachments but it was not easy, there were limited software options for dealing with documents on small portable devices. So I saw an opportunity.” Fortunately Formanek had been working in forms and documents management since the mid 80’s so knew a little of what would be involved in creating a solution.

The result was RepliGo. It was launched in January 2003, with support for Palm and Pocket PC, the first commercial Symbian implementation was added in May of the same year.

“Document conversion creates many challenges because of the variation in content from text documents with hundreds of pages to documents consisting of complex graphic,” says Formanek. “Because handheld devices have limited processing capacity, and very few offer graphics accelerators, the main challenge we faced was creating conversion software which provided an understanding of the document so that it could be efficiently reformatted for a small screen device, without compromising file size.”

The result is a proprietary file format which Formanek claims is much smaller and faster than PDF, this is because it stores document format information and the RepliGo converter also compresses and simplifies graphics with wireless devices in mind. On a page with complex graphic, Lynn claims that RepliGo can be 10 to 20 times faster than the same document in PDF format viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader. “It is difficult to make a direct comparison because of the variation in capabilities of Adobe’s PDF viewers for different platforms,” says Formanek. “I believe the most advanced mobile PDF viewer is the one for Pocket PC. On this platform complex pages in PDF can take 30 to 40 seconds to render, the same page can be rendered by the RepliGo viewer in a second or two.”

One of the key enablers for Cerience has been testing. Cerience started the project by creating test data and designing a mechanism to automate testing almost before any code was created. “Through all my work with document systems I have always gathered a test set upfront,” says Formanek. Conversion software is extremely complex and having a test set from the start is essential to ensuring you have a robust product because documents are so variable. If you don’t know the data you are working with you can not write a program to deal with it.”

Cerience’s test library holds over a hundred thousand PDF files and tens of thousands of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files. Harvested with a web crawler these documents are used to test both the desktop converter and the viewers.

The converter and the core viewer engine are tested on a desktop PC. Throughout the development process Cerience has always had a set of dedicated computers running tests on the converter ensuring it is able to convert every document in its test library, with a smaller subset being tested more closely to ensure accurate conversion. The viewer is then tested by exercising its functionality using hooks added specifically to enable testing. These allow the viewers functionality to be invoked as it displays a document. Again bulk testing is done to ensure the viewer behaves correctly while a subset is checked to ensure the documents are rendered accurately.

To enable testing of the handheld viewer again commands have been inserted into the application to allow functionally to be invoked by a test suite. Then, with a test set of anything up to 10,000 documents loaded onto a memory card, the viewer will automatically open each file, page through the file, switch viewing modes and exercise all the viewer functionality. In these tests Cerience check problems such as failed commands, memory leaks or application hangs.

“I believe the testing has paid off,” says Formanek. “We hear of customers using RepliGo for some large projects, one customer has 1500 page manuals in RepliGo format, only by testing to the limit have we been able to ensure the robustness that our customer need.”

While development of the converter and UI engine are done using Microsoft Visual C++ other tools are used for the client viewers. One of the first prototype viewers was for the Nokia 9200 Communicator and the development was undertaken using the command line tools from the Nokia SDK. The next project was the Sony Ericsson P800 for which Cerience purchased the Metrowerks CodeWarrior Wireless Development Kit for Symbian OS. “Initially we were not too clear what the kit was,” says Jim Moy, Software Engineer. “Once we dug through the suitcase it turned out to be the similar set of Symbian tools but wrapped up in the CodeWarrior IDE so we ended up using that for the P800.”

The project to create a Series 60 viewer started using the command line utilities for the first ports but switched to CodeWarrior when it added Series 60 development support.

Cerience also use the CodeWarrior tools for its Palm development. “While it is only the source code for the viewer engine that is shared between Symbian OS and Palm the fact that the tools are familiar is a great advantage,” says Moy.

Moy also has a very high opinion of Symbian OS. “If I could live only on Symbian I would be a very happy camper,” says Moy “You can tell that the framework has been very well thought out, it is deep and broad. You can gain leverage at the low level classes all over the framework. It’s a very nice environment to work in. However to really appreciate it you have to be something of a C++ geek because they take advantage of advanced C++ features.”

To date Cerience have relied heavily on viral marketing and pure features to sell RepliGo. In addition to the small footprint files the viewer provides several features which are not found on the Adobe viewer including the ability to highlight text and add annotations, but the biggest difference is the converter costs less than $30 US.

Cerience have looked at shipping RepliGo as an on-device product however it has not been practical. “Our focus is on the wireless market, which means the users ultimately do not want to be connected to a PC,” says Formanek. “We have been approached by carriers but at the moment we need to include the PC converter which makes shipping the product on a device hard. Our next step is to deliver tools which can transparently deliver documents to wireless users without the need for a desktop component. We expect to deliver these solutions before the end of the year.”

The challenges of bringing a new product to market are hard enough without competing with an existing established product, particularly one as universal as PDF. Cerience have addressed this challenge by concentrating on the technical rather than the marketing to ensure they have a robust product which creates satisfied users. Cerience next step is to leverage customer satisfaction into widespread market adoption.

For more information on RepliGo visit www.repligo.com.

Next week we will take a closer look at the RepliGo solution with a full product review.