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 ...