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Architecture, code and tools – from the Symbian staff

Setting Java™ Applications Free with JRT

Aug 12th by aarnos

We’re Jyrki Aarnos, package owner for the Mobile Runtime for Java™ Applications (JRT), and Aleksi Uotila, product manager for JRT within Nokia. Together with a talented team at Nokia we’ve been working to create an open runtime for Java applications.

Jyrki Aarnos

Recently, Nokia contributed the JRT to the Symbian Foundation and it is available in the latest Symbian^3 PDK. This means that developers can write Java applications for Symbian^3 devices, like the Nokia N8. More importantly, the JRT is now open source so the community can modify and add to the JRT implementation under the terms of the Symbian Foundation’s EPL license.

The JRT contribution is compatible with shipping Symbian devices and fully supports the Symbian^3 feature set, including hardware accelerated graphics. The contribution of JRT includes the following open source API implementations: Read more »

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ASD is now available in Chinese

Jun 14th by majinate

Collaboration is at the heart of Symbian’s ethos, and we’re pleased to announce today the result of an important collaboration between Symbian, Majinate and Platomix to deliver the Accredited Symbian Developer scheme to Chinese developers in Chinese.

This was no mean undertaking, since the database of questions used in the exam is very extensive and the questions themselves test the nuances of understanding of even the most experienced developer. Translating these correctly into Chinese was a great way of checking the curriculum and questions and making sure they were up to date and correct. Jing, Yuhui and Shu, thanks very much for your help.

The translation of the questions was done in parallel with the translation of the delivery infrastructure, which was itself a large task. So the exam can now be delivered in a Chinese environment with Chinese content.

But an exam in isolation isn’t a panacea. We also need Chinese language support, training, materials and marketing. This is where the help of Platomix has been invaluable. Having a local representative who understands the local culture and environment in which the exam is delivered will help us to accommodate local market requirements. And it’s worth remembering that the market requirements are what drive the ASD scheme. Read more »

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Forum Reorganization

Jun 10th by Sebastian Brannstrom (teknolog)

If you hang around our forums, you will have noticed some major changes lately. Forums have moved around, names have been changed and some have even disappeared. The aim of this exercise has been to update our structure to reflect current usage.

Our forum structure was set up almost a year ago, when the Symbian developer site first launched. Since then a small number of new forums have also been added. While the structure of the forums had been carefully designed, after a year it had become clear that many forums were seeing few, if any, posts. Also, users seemed to have difficulty finding the right forum for their post. With 48 forums to choose from, one could hardly blame them.

As part of the Great Platform Information initiative, we decided to take a step back and redesign the forum structure based on actual usage. I started a forum thread with a rough proposal for a new forum architecture, asking the community to help me out. Read more »

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Symmetric Multiprocessing technology in Symbian

Jun 8th by Michiko Nagai

Last week at the OSS Consortium Seminar in Tokyo the chair of the SMP Working Group (SMP-WG) in Symbian, Koichiro Yamashita from Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., delivered a lecture about the Symbian Foundation and the SMP-WG. The SMP-WG has been established to make the Symbian SMP implementation the best mobile SMP platform in the world. It was established in December 2009, and started operation in January 2010. Read more »

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DIY – Doc it Yourself with DITA

Jun 3rd by Tim Williams

Hi, I’m Tim Williams from the Technical Communications team.

A few weeks ago we updated the Symbian^3 Product Developer Library (and Jo blogged about it here). For those of us involved it was a significant milestone in a process that has taken several months and is still not complete. We’re aware that the Library is not perfect, and that the content is only slightly different from the previous version that we published back in 2009, but this version is built entirely in-house at Symbian using a completely new, open source tool chain.

The PDL comprises documentation content from several sources:

  • Much of it is hand-crafted text written over many years by authors in Symbian Ltd (and now Nokia). As part of the change to open-source tooling Nokia have now converted this to DITA XML. The ‘raw’ XML is stored in the Foundation’s Mercurial repository (in the Docscontent package).
  • The Reference section of the PDL is created automatically from comments embedded in the platform source code. The comments use the open Doxygen standard and the new toolchain, called Orb, converts them into DITA XML too. Orb is also in a Symbian package, Doctools.

From now on we’ll be building the PDL each time we build a new PDK, so it will be up to date with the latest source. Read more »

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Read all about it!

May 17th by Hamish Willee
coresearchfw architecture description

coresearchfw context diagram

We’ve some great news for developers looking for general architecture documentation about Symbian packages or how-to guides for working with the kernel and hardware services package.

Online architecture documentation for Symbian^3

You may not have spotted it previously, but a chunk of Symbian^3 Architecture documentation was made available on the Symbian developer website in March this year. We didn’t announce it widely because early releases had limited content and some issues with its presentation. Thanks to hard work from Petri and the team at Nokia, there has been steady improvement, and the most recent release includes architectural documentation for an additional 22 packages.

The documentation consists of overviews and context diagrams for a number of packages and individual components. This material is created using tools that scrape the code line to generate automated content and then combine it with extra documentation contributed by the package owners.

At the moment the documentation is uploaded to the site as static HTML, but longer term we plan to provide it in the developer wiki and cross link it directly to the reference documentation. There is still some way to go before that can happen, but in the meantime we’d appreciate your bug reports and feedback as comments to this wiki page.

Kernel and hardware services package documentation

Thanks to the kernelhwsrv package owner and team at Nokia, we’re now able to provide a number of guides to working with the kernelhwsrv package.  The documents are stored in the Mercurial repository and can be downloaded in a zip file with the Symbian^3 code for the package. Written by members of the Symbian base team (past and present) some of the documents are legacy “how to” guides for working with the package, while others are more recent, including guides to SMP migration for drivers and user-side code. Read more »

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Get RSS feeds on your wiki pages

May 13th by Hamish Willee
RSS

Got RSS?

You can now display RSS feeds within your wiki pages.

You can use feeds from any source, including your blogs, twitter feeds, or even from the wiki itself ! This is very handy if you want to share newsfeeds and updates from other sites and resources. For example, we’ve used this approach to provide progress updates about the new Python book here, using the #symbianpython twitter hashtag RSS feed.

We’ve created some instructions and simple examples in the help page. Thanks to the Symbian web team for making this happen!

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The new Symbian^3 reference library is live!

May 6th by stichbury

After weeks of expectation, we’re pleased to be able to release a new version of the Symbian^3 reference library for product developers. You can find it on the Symbian developer website here.

The library will look quite familiar in places, since it is based on content published previously on the Symbian developer website. However, the last release was back in October 2009. Since then, Nokia have been hard at work converting the content to a standard format (more of that in a future blog post), contributing it to us under EPL and providing an open source tool chain to allow us to combine the content with API reference built from doxygen comments in code. The resulting fruits of their labours is the library you see today, which has also had significant input from Symbian’s web development and delivery teams. A big thank you to all in Nokia’s sysdocs team, and to Alex, Andy and Chetan!

Symbian^3 reference library front page

The library is significantly improved from the previous version in that there’s much more content available, and a number of updates and bug fixes have been applied. There are some known bugs outstanding – this is the first release of many and we decided to bring it out now rather than wait any longer to resolve some issues. Most of the major problems we’re aware of are described in a wiki page. If you find others and want to notify Dominic, the documentation package owner, please raise a bug or leave a note on the wiki page for us to do so.

And, of course, we always welcome discussion and improvement suggestions over on the Symbian developer discussion forum or in the comments below.

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Easy Web Application Development with Symbian, Just Spread the Word

Apr 29th by paulbsymbian

On April 6th I blogged about the recent beta release of the Symbian Web Development Tools. I want to follow up on that post with some feedback from the community, and what it really means for developers.

Recently I was at a meetup event in San Francisco and talking with a developer who was really pleased with the Web development experience for Symbian.  He had learned C and C++ in school, but since then had primarily done Web programming. When he started developing on Symbian he was happy that he didn’t have to dust off his rusty C++ programming skills and deal with memory management. Instead he could just continue using his Web programming skills with which he has years of expertise. And by learning just a few additional JavaScript APIs, he was able to access some of the device specific features, like the contacts, accelerometer, and location. The previewing, debugging, packaging and deployment functionality in the tools also contributed to his transition to mobile device app creation.

So the lesson seems to be, if you can develop for the Web then you can develop applications for Symbian. The simplicity of this message hopefully makes it easy for the word to spread among the Web development community. With so many Web developers out there and so many great devices coming to market, I’m sure that conversations like the one I had recently will be repeated many times over. Convergence is happening between once distinct tribes and this makes for really interesting and exciting community interactions.

It’s been proven that compelling applications have the ability to fuel robust communities. In this way, Symbian Web Development Tools are an excellent entry point for Web developers to broaden their experience and seize opportunities in the mobile marketplace. And the low learning curve enables them to just start making and deploying great Web apps, complimenting their portfolio along the way. Read more »

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Accredited Symbian Developer has a New Wardrobe

Apr 22nd by andrewkl

Hi, I’m Ian Weston from Majinate Limited. We’ve been running the Accredited Symbian Developer (ASD) certification scheme for Symbian since 2005. After a lengthy break, in which we’ve revamped the branding scheme to match the Symbian Foundation, we’re back up and running with an updated exam, image and business model.

We believe that to make the most of Symbian as a developer, you need a structured guide to the features it provides and a way to test whether you’ve understood and can apply the knowledge gained from a course of learning.  Since day one, the scheme has been founded on a solid curriculum that addresses real-world use of the Symbian platform, and is designed and maintained by Symbian experts in discussion with the widest possible range of stakeholders. Read more »

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