symbian programming starter question

Question

Hello, I would like to start programming for symbianOS and have some starter questions.I am a little confused and would like someone with developing experience to advice me. First of all what do I need to start programming? I have downloaded S60-5th edition Sdk and eclipse pulsar, are those enough or I need anything else?

also using that SDK I will target all the s60 devices or there are other dependencies as well? what I mean is, using that sdk my application will be able to run under all devices using symbian s60?

also is there any deference in developing using j2me ,symbianC++ and c++? any additional restrictions?

is there any developer resources like android has and other have, which provide code samples, documentations and explanatory articles?

thanks in advanced maxsap.

Answer 1

The S60 SDK is all you need if you're only targeting the device. For emulator toolchain, editor, debugger etc. I suggest you get Carbide.C++. (It's based on Eclipse. I don't know how it compares to Eclipse Pulsar as I have no experience about it.)

With the S60 5th Edition SDK you can target practically all S60 devices from S60 3rd Edition onwards. Of course, not all APIs available on 5th Edition are available on 3rd Edition.

If you are starting Symbian development anew and have no specific reason to use traditional Symbian C++, I suggest you have a look at Qt. It works on most S60 devices from 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (S60 3.1) onwards and is much nicer to work with than plain old Symbian C++. It also works nicely across platforms: the same source can in theory be compiled to almost any target supporting Qt (in practice some flagging is needed and not all APIs are available on all targets).

The Forum Nokia site is a good starting point for all of the above.