This allows you to extend ELF's capabilities and take advantage of those changes from within Applixware. Like Java, ELF is a platform-independent language that does not need to be recompiled on each platform. In general, ELF applications execute slower than C or Java. ELF's loose type checking is an advantage in smaller applications, but can become a disadvantage for large-scale applications. Unlike C, ELF is fully memory-safe and includes error signalling.
Developers are free to focus on algorithms and the user interface rather than memory management.
ELF also provides simple and robust interfaces to relational databases. However, ELF's strengths could help find it a strong developer community. By offering the LPD application in Open Source, developers will be able to use the interface to extend the use of their data into either their own programs or into other applications which run on Linux machines. Thousands of developers have already used ELF as part of Applixware to build a wide variety of applications. The Linux Palm Desktop application will be posted at the Applix Open Source Central site.