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Vinay and I attended Nokia’s OpenC roadshow at the Taj WestEnd, Bangalore today. Nokia is a company that is an extremely bleeding edge competitor…

And that too with C programming now being built in… The speakers mentioned that their target audience is Linux programmers. And they want them to move / migrate onto Symbian. I do not know the actual possibilites of this situation as after looking through the entire seminar, but then Nokia’s OpenC is something that goes thus:

1. POSIX compliant libraries ported onto Symbian. (70% of compliance to the POSIX Standards.)
2. There are 9 libraries that have been ported.
3. The libraries are available for Nokia S60 3rd Edition FP2 onwards. Currently, only the E61i and N95 support this.
4. Helps provide helper api’s for native level application porting onto Symbian platforms.

Now, Looking at each point in the amount of detail as I see it:

1. POSIX compliant libraries: This means a lot of mileage for NOKIA where they’re directly targeting LINUX geeks to get on board with Symbian development…
Nevertheless, U may write the LINUX kernel, but you cannot make head or tail of NEWL() and NEWLC(). Symbian is still not changing this stuff. OpenC will only give native C programmers some features.

2. 9 Libraries ported: These 9 libraries that have been ported are claimed to satisfy 100% of the requrirements for a C programmer porting his native application onto Symbian. There are some glitches that may occur. And they claim that if a library does not comply completely, it would be documented correspondingly…

I’m extremely skeptical of this. Any symbian programmer would know the pathetic state of Symbian SDK documentation and SDK Help. No wonder Forum Nokia and NewLC forums are the most haunted places by symbian programmers…

3.S60 3rd Edition FP2 onwards: This leaves out 36 of 38 Symbian S60 phone models available in the market. Which, to the already hurt Symbian programmers is not fair. Hurt Symbian programmers I mention here because of the hit independent programmers have taken since the inception of Symbian 9.0 and platform security and Symbian Signed which costs 400$ for a single applicaiton… An indi guy CANNOT do this… Not in India at the least…

4. Native level Application porting: This is a plus and a minus as far as I see it. Nokia is not giving device level access to the OpenC applications at all… This means that the native runtime would only be running a certain amount of functional code. The rest would have to be written or implemented via Symbian C++. This may look like a decent negative for Linux programmers / C programmers and in favour of Symbian programmers.
The UI for example still needs to be written in Symbian C++. C based function calls from C code using the 9 provided API’s will use the OpenC runtime. Everything else will still be native Symbian C++. No bluetooth, wi-fi, wi-max, wi-watever access from OpenC.

An interesting point that was made by one of the Symbian Corporation guys present there during the talk was that the whole C code, on compiling would be wrapped into a Symbian compliant wrapper and the binary would execute as a normal native applicaiton. Just that the linking libraries would be the POSIX libraries that are ported.

Examples: Oracle has successfully ported BerkelyDB onto Symbian’s S60 3rd Edition FP2 phones. The DB has an astonishingly small footprint of 400kb. This is open / free to users / developers and licensing would be needed only on commercial releases. Thinking about the opportunities a database onboard a mobile applicaiton would add to an end user, I was bummed by the fact that the end user would first have to purchase a 40-grand phone to use the feature set…

Overall a very nice piece of technology from Nokia again… I blogged about the event for one simple reason… I really respect and adore NOKIA for the sheer enthusiasm, speed and precision with which they push the technology blanket further and further everyday. Just when we thought Symbian was not C++, they said “hey! forget symbian, forget C++, do C”… Things just got simpler…

Tags: Nokia, OpenC, Symbian, Oracle, Berkely+DB, S60, FP2, NewLC, Forum+Nokia, Taj+West+End, Events, Bangalore