Porting to the Symbian Platform: Open Mobile Development in C/C++

Chapter 2. The Porting Process

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

—Anon

This chapter discusses various strategies for porting code to the Symbian platform. There are many different types of software project and a number of different ways of porting the code for any specific project. My view is that there is no single 'right' way to approach a port although there are several 'wrong' ones! Most successful efforts will follow a very similar high-level process. I present that process with descriptions of the options available at each stage so that developers can make informed choices and understand the potential consequences of following a particular strategy. A lot of the decisions involved are about trade-offs between maintenance issues, such as keeping a common code-base, and other factors, such as porting effort, performance, usability, native look-and-feel, and so on. Often it is tempting to create a 'fork'^[30] of the original project for speed or simplicity but it's important to bear in mind the lifetime cost of this decision, including maintaining your own version of the software you've branched from. This is such an important topic that we dedicate Chapter 15 to portability and maintenance issues. While this chapter presents several options that could result in a 'fork' being created, please consider the alternatives very carefully before making the choice.

There are usually a lot of unknowns at the beginning of a porting project and the top-down approach, ...