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I didn't realise what the Opera Platform SDK was really all about until I read Russell Beattie's post on the release. I immediately dived into the documentation, and so long as you know a smattering of AJAX, Javascript, CSS, XHTML and XML this looks like the easiest way yet of developing high level mobile applications I've yet come across. Yes, although the bindings to the underlying mobile infrastructure aren't as mature, it's even easier to use that Python for Series 60, at least for applications with graphical interfaces...

The demo application included with the SDK shows exactly what can be done with these new technologies, and it looks impressive.

 
The Opera Mobile Platform in action...
Of course, being me, the first thing I tried to figure out how to develop under Mac OS X. It looks like the only tool from the Symbian SDK you need is the makesis application, which compiles just fine under Mac OS X,

  wget http://symbianos.org/~andreh/makesis-2.0.0.tar.gz
  tar -xvzf makesis-2.0.0.tar.gz
  cd makesis-2.0.0
  make
  make regtest

...and since Opera provide a copy of their Platform-enabled browser for Mac OS X, so you can test your applications on your desktop machine before using bluetooth to deploy them onto your mobile device, it looks like cross-platform development under Mac OS X is pretty well supported.

Update: Opera are hosting a forum for discussion of their mobile platform. Not much content there yet, but it does look like a couple of people from the development team are reading it, so it could turn into a good resource.

Update: A lightning update for the Application Framework...

Update: More from Ajaxian.com on AJAX on a Pocket PC...

Tags: Web 2.0 Mobile AJAX Apple Mac OS X Development Opera SDK Series 60 makesis Windows Mobile