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Symbian 60 and Java
| Tue, 2006-01-31 10:28 | |
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Hello
I am a new user and plans to start developing for Symbian 60 mobiles. I am a little confused as to what role does J2ME play in Symbian. I mean isn't both J2ME (MIDP 1 and 2) and Symbian are two different environments by two different companies? Then why does when you go to download Symbian SDK it says there are two versions, one for Java and one for C++? How they are integrated with each other? I have downloaded SDK for Symbian v7.0 and also got Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.3, is this enough to start developing? Although I could have used an IDE for this purpose but initially I would like to use Notepad. Suggest me a good free IDE.  |
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Forum posts: 720
On top of Symbian there's also a Java execution environment/run-time with the Java virtual machine et al. That's quite comparable to running Java on a Windows or Linux PC.
The difference is that on a mobile phone you have the more limited J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) or MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) version of Java, whereas on a PC you have J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition) or the "server-version", J2EE (Java 2 Extended Edition).
So, the choice of whether to use Java or C++ for Symbian/S60 software development is up to you, depending on what kind of apps you want to do (better performance and more access to lower-level phone/Symbian/S60 features from C++ than from Java).
In addition, you can also do many kinds of apps using Python on S60 phones.
There's also AppForge's Crossfire for running versions of Microsoft's Visual Basic/.NET language based apps.
Forum posts: 2
AppForge Crossfire is good but it is not free.
Forum posts: 10
Forum posts: 78
As far as I remember Borland JBuilderX Personal (or was JBuilder 9 Mobile edition?) is free and ships in a quite well configured mode. Also Nokia Developer Suite integrates with JBuilder. So you could start developing quickly without having to overcome the configuration headaches.
I believe it's a good starting point. Some would say Eclipse + Ant is a better combination (and I tend to agree), but they are more complex to set up and tune. Don't know about Sun free products and there doesn't seem to be a lot of people using them.
Compilable Symbian Code Examples