Porting to the Symbian Platform: Open Mobile Development in C/C++

Chapter 9. Porting from Other Mobile Platforms

We are currently not planning on conquering the world.

—Sergey Brin

Like many of the other chapters in this book, the topics covered here could be the subject of one or more separate books. To provide complete guides for porting between the Symbian platform and other mobile platforms such as those discussed here – Android, BREW and iPhone OS – would be a near impossible task. Instead we have focused on providing useful information about the most common issues that you may face when moving from one platform to another.

Additionally, we've attempted to minimize your porting effort by taking a view on the most similar run-time environment to target when porting 'native'^[154] code from the originating platform to Symbian. In the case of Android, we suggest porting to native Symbian C++ because, at the time of writing, there is no other match for the rich API set provided by Android. In contrast, the API set for BREW is more limited and so most applications could more easily be ported for Symbian using Java ME. Porting from iPhone OS is somewhere in between and, because Cocoa and the UIKit have some close similarities with Qt in places, we recommend using Qt as the target framework for your Symbian port.

When reading this chapter, it's important to keep in mind that the suggestions presented here represent only a subset of the available options for moving between platforms. Since all of the platforms are still evolving, the simplest targets ...