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Maybe the information from this book is a little out of date, also maybe size can not tell everything about an open source project.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 :)