Qt for Symbian

Chapter 6. Qt Apps and Native Symbian Extensions

Angelo Perkusich, Kyller Costa Gorgônio and Hyggo Oliveira de Almeida

Symbian OS is an open, mobile operating system that is embedded in a large diversity of smart phones today. Symbian OS offers a fully featured framework for developing applications in the C ++ language, including modules for networking, concurrency and accessing native smart-phone features. With the increasing power and dissemination of smart phones, the demand for software is also growing. This requires higher level tools to speed up the development and increase software quality. In this context, Qt is the most promising solution for achieving massive and high-quality application development. Developers can use the Qt framework to create new applications and port existing Qt applications to devices running Symbian OS with 5th Edition v1.0, as well as 3rd Edition FP1 and later devices. In this chapter we present an overview of the Symbian OS main features as well as Qt Native Symbian Extensions

Data Types and Symbian OS Class Naming Conventions

Instead of using native C ++ types, Symbian OS has its own fundamental types defined as a set of typedefs in the Symbian header file e32def.h. This is necessary to keep compiler independence. Symbian OS types should always be used instead of the native ones. Developers should use void when a function or method has no return type, instead of TAny.

By convention, there are several class types on Symbian OS, with different characteristics, ...