Tommi's reports from Wonderland

February 07, 2007 Open C - making S60 development easier Posted by Tommi at 10:56 AM | Categories: General

Along with S60 3rd Edition FP2, Nokia has just announced the availability of something great called Open C. Quote from the press release:

Development of applications and services for S60 devices will be faster and more cost-efficient as S60 brings a major extension to the C++ development environment with Open C. This introduction brings the familiar standard C function libraries to S60 software, supporting increased productivity and improved time-to-market of applications. With Open C, developers can reuse existing code and focus on the mobility aspects of their applications.

Symbian recently introduced four of the basic POSIX libraries on Symbian OS. With Open C, S60 is extending the reach and implementing five additional C libraries for an optimized solution to migrate open source and desktop applications to S60 on Symbian OS. Open C libraries are part of the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 and will be integrated into the publicly available software development kits.

I believe this could be a big thing. Huge.

Let me explain.

Question: Why is it so great?

Open C is great basically for three reasons:
- It makes S60 development easier for current S60 developers
- It makes starting S60 development significantly easier for the millions of C++ developers out there
- It makes porting existing applications (e.g. open source and desktop apps) to S60 significantly easier

I think Open C effort has a fighting chance to increase the number of active S60 developers by an order of magnitude. Consequently, I think we'll see truckloads of interesting new S60 applications in the future.

Question: oh my god, are you breaking (again) the S60 compatibility?

No. Applications developed with Open C will work in all S60 3rd Edition devices. If I understood correctly, the Open C parts can be included with some kind of plugin in the sis package, so that they work in older devices.

Question: Yay!! What should I do now?

If you are developer, read more from Forum Nokia. ~~(I'll update this page when the page is up and I find the link)~~

If you are a blogger, please spread the word!

If you are "just a regular" S60 user, answer this: Which open source project would you like to see ported to S60?

Everybody: what do you think about the whole thing? The team behind Open C initiative is eagerly waiting for your feedback...

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Comments

My initial reaction has been: great stuff, and surely a huge improvement over the ESTLIB partial support for the ANSI C standard library that was available as the only option so far.

My only concern is that the second part of the portability equation is missing: support for non-Symbian build scripts - all I have seen about Open C and P.I.P.S. (Symbian's underlying POSIX core libs) makes me believe that people are still expected to rewrite the makefiles as .mmp files.

However, this may not be an option for people who have a large codebase where the build description and infrastructure (makefiles, SCons, nightly builds etc.) consists a large part of the product's value, and creating a parallel infrastructure in MMP files would just not be maintainable.

I suspect that this is already being worked on (as this post suggests http://symbianblogs.com/2007/02/05/pips-tooling/), but it may still mean some reverse engineering of bldmake-generated files for the time being...

Being a software developer, I think these are awesome news indeed (specially the part where you don't need to have FP2 to take advantage of this =D). I know some C/C++, but I never tried to develop for S60, Open C might well be what makes me take the plunge.

Did they manage to get rid of the CleanupStack and still be able to gracefully handle the out-of-resource situations? Via exceptions?

"Just a regular" S60 user (N80):
I would love to see MPlayer ported to S60, with a nice GUI of course. As "just a regular" S60 I'm not sure whether the N80 has enough juice to play media like it was sold to me; I've yet to get anything to work satisfactorily yet. I'm a Linux user, and even on small 30 second clips, I don't seem to be able to encode anything that will play sound on my phone through DivX Player; the video is ok but I've tried all the codecs available in OGMRip without success.

MPlayer on my phone would be truly awesome. I wouldn't be so tempted by the iPhone then ;-)

the Open C additions don't include user interface components, as far as I know. The UI must still be done using Symbian C++ and the Avkon libraries.

Is this what you're looking for Tommi:

http://www.forum.nokia.com/open_c.html

Let's hope it's a relatively full implementation, not a cherry picked subset, like what was implemented in PyS60.

In this exact order:

1. GAIM
2. VLC

Best I can think of right now.

why reinvent the wheel, worry for bugs in openc...
use linux and be happy!!

blogs.s60.tommi's

Would it be possible to go the other way? What is S60 apps could be moved to the N800 (linux tablet) for example... that would potentially open up quite a massive library of software.

Why does Open C only support S60 3rd Edition?? Which means I could not write unique code for both S60 2nd and 3rd.

Being a software developer, I think these are awesome news indeed (specially the part where you don't need to have FP2 to take advantage of this =D).

S60 Open to new features

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