Skip to Main Content
Developing Software for Symbian OS: A Beginner's Guide to Creating Symbian OS v9 Smartphone Applications in C++
book

Developing Software for Symbian OS: A Beginner's Guide to Creating Symbian OS v9 Smartphone Applications in C++

by Steve Babin
December 2007
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
460 pages
10h 12m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Developing Software for Symbian OS: A Beginner's Guide to Creating Symbian OS v9 Smartphone Applications in C++

Chapter 11. Symbian OS TCP/IP Network Programming

The ability to communicate data is a feature that differentiates smartphones from traditional voice-only mobile phones. Smartphones can connect to a network through cellular technologies such as GPRS and EDGE and perform a variety of tasks normally associated with networked PCs. Many phones also have Wi-Fi capability, allowing them to connect to a wireless Local Area Network (LAN).

Here are just some of the smartphone applications made possible by data communication:

  • browsing (HTML, WAP)

  • email

  • instant messaging

  • streaming media (mobile video services, etc.)

  • multiplayer network-connected games.

The TCP/IP protocol suite is used for most networked services including the examples just given. In fact, TCP/IP is the de facto standard for communicating on the Internet (it's almost synonymous with the Internet itself), and is used in most private data networks as well.

Symbian OS provides full TCP/IP networking support as well as a socket-based API to allow developers to write their own communication software. This chapter introduces TCP/IP on a Symbian OS device and shows how to use the socket API to write your own TCP/IP networking applications. The most popular network API for programming in TCP/IP is the Berkley Unix (or BSD) C-based socket API and it is presented in this chapter for comparison (Symbian supports a version of it). The Symbian OS native C++ socket API is then presented, and compared with the BSD socket API.

Note that to call the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Windows XP for Starters: The Missing Manual

Windows XP for Starters: The Missing Manual

David Pogue
Autonomic Computing

Autonomic Computing

Richard Murch
Oracle® Database 10g Insider Solutions

Oracle® Database 10g Insider Solutions

Arun Kumar R., John Kanagaraj, Richard Stroupe
Borland® Delphi™ 6 Developer's Guide

Borland® Delphi™ 6 Developer's Guide

Steve Teixeira, Xavier Pacheco

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470725702Purchase book