Symbian OS development has until today been very hands on, even when using an IDE for most of the coding. Developers have had to get stuck in with command line tools, coding every line of an application and unraveling a complex SDK structure. While those days are not entirely over Borland's addition of Symbian support in its Together modeling solutions, the availability of gSOAP and a RAD designer for building Series 60 UIs will make life a lot easier for veteran and novice Symbian OS developers.

John Ray Thomas, Borland's Product Manager for Mobile Solutions, identified the main reason for Borland adding RAD support for Symbian OS being that hands on approach required for Symbian OS development. "If you are new to Symbian OS it is not easy to quickly get building applications, not only is the build system complex, with many Perl scripts, but learning the APIs is a challenge," says John Ray. "The APIs are so comprehensive, with many layers, there are so many different possible ways to approach development and it is not clear which one is right. Our RAD support makes things more straightforward by providing a straight-forward use of the framework in which developers can build an application."

The RAD tool allows developers to create Series 60 UIs by simply dragging and dropping objects from a component pallet onto a screen and then adjusting them with an object inspector. The tools even allow non-visual components such as alert sounds to be "coded" by drag and drop although the developer still has to add the program logic to activate these non-visual components. This framework of pre-tested code, John Ray believes, will be a real bonus for developers, as will the fact that the Form Designer frees them from thinking about details like layout co-ordinates while designing the UI.

"Symbian OS has faced a challenge when compared to .NET compact framework or J2ME," says John Ray. "Both of these tools have RAD support which makes them really accessible to developers, with the release of C++BuilderX 1.5, Symbian OS has tools to equal, or better, its competition."

John Ray explains that the volume of Series 60 devices now shipping and the large potential developer audience is the reason Series 60 is the first Symbian OS platform to get RAD support. However Series 60 is really a beginning. "We have built an innovative tool in C++BuilderX, which provides full RAD support for the pure C++ Symbian API. It was not a trivial task but what we have created is a RAD support architecture that is platform and framework agnostic," says John Ray. "Our goal is to expand our platform support in the future and that could include other Symbian OS platforms as well as other operating systems."

Borland also partners with Sony Ericsson, currently they have a P900 phone-in-a-box development kit and while John Ray would not give specific information on UIQ support, he did say that "it is likely that we will be looking at similar support for other Symbian OS platforms."

While the RAD support is important, John Ray believes that the two other new capabilities release with C++BuilderX 1.5 may have a more significant impact on Symbian OS development.

The first is UML modeling support, provided by Borland Together solutions in Enterprise Studio for Mobile. It allows existing Symbian OS projects to be opened and models within that projects structure to viewed or created. More importantly the tools allow new patterns, classes or design to be added in the context of the Symbian project and code created from the revised model using model-to-code support. This takes the important step of moving Symbian OS development towards achieving not just code reuse but design reuse. UML modeling technology is also being increasingly used in enterprise environments where complex requirements benefit from the structure UML solutions provide in ensuring that business requirements are captured and accurately transferred to implemented code.

The second tool is a port of gSOAP, the Open Source library which provides a SOAP API for C and C++ developers. This will allow developers to more easily implement enterprise application on Symbian OS devices. "Web Services is the biggest enterprise trend in mobility," says John Ray. "Because the enterprise is dealing with so many disparate back ends they are using web services based on SOAP to mobilize their data. So by adding SOAP support to Symbian OS with our port of gSOAP, which includes client side support to import WSDL and retrieving objects, I believe the enterprise should really be able to efficiently extend their applications to the Symbian platform."

These new tools for Borland are a huge step into the mainstream of applications development for the Symbian OS. The capabilities release with C++BuilderX should significantly reduce the time and effort required to implement a Series 60 application while improving application build quality by creating much of the code from proven building block. The provision of gSOAP and UML modeling support will also ease the workload in the enterprise environment and further enhance the appeal of Symbian OS for enterprise applications.

Web: www.borland.com/mobile