Opening up the tool chain: bmconv, petran and rcomp

As announced during the Developers Days, the Symbian Developer Network has just released the source for the Symbian OS build tools bmconv, petran and rcomp together with test code that exercises some of their functionality. These tools enable developers to pre-process and post-process their apps, images and resources to object formats ready for runtime loading in Symbian OS phones.

(These tools are found only as executables in all Symbian OS SDKs in the \Epoc32\tools directory.)

  bmconv handles the conversion of bitmaps as part of the application build process (abld). It can also be used in its own right to convert .mbms back into .bmps.

  petran is the PE object format translator that processes the final object files to the format that the Symbian OS loader expects.

  rcomp is the Symbian OS resource compiler which builds the binary resource files used most commonly from application controls (localization, etc.) at runtime. RSC files are compiled using rcomp.

The publication of the source of bmconv, petran and rcomp complements the earlier publication of makesis, the tool used to package apps up in .SIS files.

The whole package is downloadable from Symbian DevNet.