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Evaluate the project before porting

kcomex | 08 May, 2008 09:16

Porting an open source project is quite different from developing a new application for mobile phones. During past days without Open C, we have to rewrite lots of code to satisfy both Symbian OS rules/limitation and difference between mobile devices and desktop computers. Touching so much code will cost more development time, but what's worse is that making changes too much will drive you thinking "Should I start a new project rather than using only a little from this existing project?". So porting an existing application onto Symbian OS makes you keep concerning how much modification will you make, if too much consider starting a new one or just share the name or brand. As far as I know, HelixCommunity is the first big and famous open source project ported to Symbian OS, and it supports as early as v6.1. I checked out its source in 2004 (means their code nowadays might be different a lot), this is one example of making too much changes so you can tell few difference between porting like this or making a new project. Since S60 3rd Edition, there is Open C we can utilize, the job is easier. But still we can not ignore this consideration because of the nature of mobile phones. In one word, first step of porting an existing project is evaluate how much changes will be made approximately.

This document in Forum Nokia web site is very helpful, and generally speaking smaller projects are always easier to make decision if it could be ported than bigger ones. Smaller ones are always based on some existing framework, if the framework exists or can be ported on Symbian OS then the project itself will be fine in most cases. Huge project like Mozilla or Helix will give us an impression that it is likely impossible to port cause it has so many dependencies and self owned framework. However, we want eveidence to support our decision. Let's get back to Mozilla, after searching its website, there is an "C/C++ Portability Guide" which shows us an amazing likeness of Symbian OS programming limitations. From this article, we could learn Mozilla code will probably contain very little exceptions, RTTI and others that Symbian OS C++ does not support. Then with the help of Open C, we could have better confidence about porting without changing too much code.

Next we have to  make  deeper  research on the inner  structure  of Mozilla platform, cause you can not start portting any piece of code without knowing which level it lies in and what it does actually. Stay tuned, I will bring more as the work goes on Smile

 

Open C, S60, Symbian C++, Mozilla | Permalink | Add comment | Trackbacks (1)

Porting Mozilla onto Symbian OS

kcomex | 04 May, 2008 01:08

Greetings Everybody! I have been a Forum Nokia Champion for over 1.5 years. Currently my major technology profession is developing native Symbian OS C++ applications mainly on S60, also I know some Python(PyS60), J2ME and Windows Mobile. Since last month I started concentrate my focus onto a very nice community, the famous Mozilla project. As I expressed before, I always feel extremely exciting about contributing my effort to something which will bring us openness, opportunities and freedom, just like the award winning desktop browser FireFox, and the possibility of running it on Symbian OS.

Frankly, at first I hadn't realized the size of the Mozilla Platform, until I read these from the book "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla":

It is 30 times larger than the Apache Web Server, 20 times larger than the Java 1.0 JDK/JRE sources, 5 times bigger than he standard Perl distribution, twice as big as the Linux kernel source, and nearly as large as the whole GNOME 2.0 desktop source—even when 150 standard GNOME applications are included.

Maybe the information from this book is a little out of date, also maybe size can not tell everything about an open source project. But what we could learn is that porting Mozilla platform onto Symbian OS will be a huge project which needs lots of hours, especially for those mobile developers with little Mozilla hacking experiences.

Here I'd like to share something I found in last 2 weeks digging, maybe some of you might become future contributor of Mozilla/FireFox on mobile devices. Also the reason I start my blogging about porting Mozilla onto Symbian OS is to continue the philosophy of open source software: making the development process and result product open, clear and collaborative.

  • It's important to know Mozilla well before get hands on code. Read their websites well, know more about open source, vision of Mozilla, historical event, maybe the unique culture from Mozilla people.
  • Mozilla platform is layered/modularized into several components, you could find the framework diagram in this blog.
  • Beginners should know where to find information or documents about Mozilla platform. There are two wikis which may confuse you: Mozilla Developer Center whose audience are mainly Mozilla platform technology users, clients, documents in this wiki are set to stone; Mozilla Wiki which shows articles in engineering stage, you could find useful information about "Mobile" in this wiki. There is another non-wiki portal with lots of well categorized documents, http://www.mozilla.org/developer/
  • Mozilla developers like IRC, meet them and feel free to ask your question at irc://irc.mozilla.org/mobile. If the link does not work for you, probably you'd like to have a FireFox with ChatZilla install.

There are a lot about porting Mozilla onto Symbian in the beginning days, I would like to write them down as time passes. I want to know more friends on this topic too, together we could make mobile Internet better with our efforts.

As part of my first blog, I want to say my thanks to Forum Nokia for providing us such a good chance to express our technology thoughts on mobile development. With this Forum Nokia Champion program I believe Forum Nokia community could be more and more popular, bring us more and more success stories one after another :)

Browsing, Symbian C++, Mozilla | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (1)

 
 
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