Symbian/C++

The purpose of this chapter is to give the reader an overview of Symbian OS application development. These .rst sections will serve as an entry-point for new developers by giving an introduction to the development environment, tools, and Symbian C++ programming language. The final sections will go through a number of the networking capabilities supported by Symbian OS, accompanied by code examples. Several researchers claim that Symbian C++ is difficult to learn, and the particular steep learning curve is typically a showstopper for many new developers, students, and other adopters. Often making it less suitable than, e.g., Java or Python for quick prototyping. However, this downside can in many cases be balanced by the fact that we through Symbian C++ obtain the full access to the devices capabilities and the speed advantage of native complied applications. Additionally Symbian OS has the advantage of a huge penetration of the smart phone market (55% in Q2 2006). Such a big penetration means that no serious mobile developer can disregard the Symbian platform. Throughout the years a number of different Symbian OS versions have been released and adopted by phone manufactures. In the following sections we will strive at being version-independent. However, in some cases where the information or code examples apply to only one particular OS version this will be noted. When writing applications be aware, that Symbian OS v9 introduced a complete binary break from the previous versions. This means that applications written previous to version 9 will need to be recompiled and partly rewritten to be able to run on version 9 phones and vice versa. In addition to the binary break, Symbian introduces an enhanced platform security model, which will not be covered in this chapter. Readers should refer to [2] for extensive information about Symbian OS platform security.