New Symbian Developer Tools for Web Developers
This week Symbian Foundation announced the availability of new application development tools allowing web developers to create Symbian applications. I thought I’d take a deeper look.
The new tools were announced as part of the Symbian^3 and Nokia N8 launch…
"ANYONE WHO CAN CREATE A WEBPAGE CAN NOW CREATE AN APP FOR SYMBIAN^3"
“Now anyone can create fantastic applications for devices such as the Nokia N8, the world’s first Symbian^3 device,”
said Lee Williams, Executive Director of Symbian
Digging deeper, the tools are just an evolution of something I mentioned June last year. The web runtime has been around for a while. A new part worth mentioning is a new Eclipse based IDE which means you don’t have to rely on the older Aptana Studio, Visual Studio or Nokia WRT Dreamweaver extension.
I had a play with the new IDE and it’s an easy-to-use way of creating S60 widgets. It also provides many Javacript library files that can be used to (as far as possible) provide a S60 look and feel.
This environment is great for hobby developers or more serious development that can live with the limitations of this environment when accessing phone features (APIs)…
- The resultant widgets will only run on newer S60 devices
- The resultant widgets are non-standard and not compatible with Opera, JIL, BONDI etc widgets
- The resultant code you write is easily extractable and readable
- The widgets have limited functionality and can’t, for example, be run as background applications
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