Category:Platform

From Symbian Developer Community

What is the Symbian Platform?

The Symbian platform is an open-source software platform for mobile devices.

At the heart of the Symbian Foundation is the Symbian platform, which:

• consists of operating system, middleware and user interface layers
• is a complete, well-integrated software stack that gives you pretty much all you need to develop devices, applications or services
• is initially composed of contributions including S60, Symbian OS, UIQ and MOAP(S)
• features approximately 20 million lines of code
• is made from the same code that has shipped in over 250M devices, from 14 of the world's top phone manufacturers

The Symbian platform is used by phone manufacturers to build phones, but because it is open-source, anyone can contribute to it. It's also open in that phones that use it allow after-market applications to be installed.

Licensing

The Symbian platform is available, in its entirety, under open source licenses (primarily the Eclipse Public License (EPL)). Anyone can access the code, modify it and create and distribute solutions on top of it.

See Symbian Source Code Licenses for more information.

Device Creation

Device creators can take advantage of the features integrated into the platform. As all the advanced building blocks are there, manufacturers are free to concentrate on the more challenging aspects of device design and user experience.

User Interface Frameworks

User interface frameworks are not offered separately, but as part of the platform. Individual device manufacturers may still choose to customize the look and feel of the UI of their devices to maintain consumer differentiation.

Programming Environments

The platform supports an extensive set of programming environments including C/C++, Web runtime based on WebKit, Ruby and Python. The foundation also provides the integration for other commercial development environments and technologies including e.g. Java ME, Flash Lite, .NET and Silverlight.