A Carbide/IDE Overview
by Mark Shackman
The earliest developers for Symbian OS were “real men”, and always used the command line tools, bldmake and abld, which still exist relatively unaltered today. The rest of us built our applications using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 6.0 IDE, at that time the only fully-fledged IDE generally available. In the intervening years, there have been other IDEs, such as Borland’s C++ BuilderX Mobile Edition and Metrowerks CodeWarrior.
For details of what IDEs are available for the various releases of Symbian OS, have a look at FAQ 1290 - What C++ toolchain do I need for developing on Symbian OS. CodeWarrior comes in a number of flavours, from Personal to Developer and OEM (details at www.forum.nokia.com/codewarrior), but Visual Studio is no longer directly supported by Symbian; see FAQ 1013, using Visual Studio .NET with Symbian OS v7.x or v8.x SDKs.
More recently, Nokia has introduced the Carbide family, based on the Eclipse product (www.forum.nokia.com/carbide). There’s an overview of the product in the Introduction to Carbide technical paper. For development in C++, there are a number of flavours available (details, whitepapers and screen casts from www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/tools_and_sdks/carbide_cpp/):
- Carbide.c++ Express: free for non-commercial use, this version is aimed at new developers and academia, and allows compilation for emulator and phone, and debugging on the emulator
- Carbide.c++ Developer: this version also contains a UI designer and allows debugging on the target phone. For a guide to setting up Carbide for on-target debugging, have a look at the Preparing for On-Target Debugging Flash tutorial.
- Carbide.c++ Professional: this version also contains a crash debugger and performance investigator
Other versions include an OEM edition, an IDE for development of Java application, a ui customisation tool (Carbide.ui) and (non-Eclipse-based plugin) support for Visual Studio. Details of how to set up and use Carbide can be seen in the Introduction to Using Carbide.c++ v1.2 Flash tutorial and at mobiledevices.kom.aau.dk/index.php?id=913
The latest version of Carbide.c++, version 1.2, was released in April 2007. You can read an interview with Mike Trujillo, the new Product Manager for Carbide.c++, where he discusses v1.2, its new features and benefits and what lies in store in future for Carbide developers.
Information about other IDE tools that are available, such as AppForge’s CrossFire , which plugs-in to Visual Studio .NET IDE to allow development of applications for a range of mobile operating systems, and Wirelexsoft’s VistaMAX, another Eclipse-based IDE, are on the Developer IDE tools page.
For a great summary of how to get started writing applications for Symbian OS and which IDE to choose, don’t miss out on the Getting Started booklet as well as our new Carbide.c++ booklet.