SymbianOS

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The SymbianOS port of Free Pascal is under construction.

Roadmap to port FPC to SymbianOS

  1. Develop a Hello World application on c++ for SymbianOS - Felipe
  2. Convert the Build software from perl to our own building system, and make it build the c++ software - Felipe
  3. Effectively start to port the Free Pascal Runtime Library - Felipe
  4. Convert some c++ symbian applications to check for errors on the port - Felipe - 1 trivial done, more to go

Versions Roadmap

The first target will be UIQ 3.0 for the Symbian OS on x86 architecture (the emulator).

Compiling Free Pascal for the Emulator

1 - Download the latest FPC from Subversion. Make sure you also have the latest stable FPC installed.

2 - Next you will need a assembler compatible with the Code Warrior linker. Currently this is the GNU Assembler. It´s a good coincidence that the emulator users normal win32 PE executables, but of course it could use any other format, so FPC will expect a cross-assembler with the correct name. Because of this we can simply copy the as.exe file that comes with FPC releases and rename it.

Suppose your win32 gnu assembler is located at: C:\Programas\lazarus20\fpc\2.0.4\bin\i386-win32\as.exe

You should make a copy of it with this name: C:\Programas\lazarus20\fpc\2.0.4\bin\i386-win32\i386-symbian-as.exe

3 - Now, open a Windows Command Line session. The following batch script will execute a full compilation of FPC for the emulator. In this particular case lazarus was installed on C:\Programas\lazarus20 and the fpc 2.1 source code is on C:\Programas\fpc21 

PATH=C:\Programas\lazarus20\fpc\2.0.4\bin\i386-win32
cd c:\Programas\fpc21
cd compiler
make i386
cd ..
cd rtl
cd symbian
make FPC=C:\Programas\fpc21\compiler\ppc386.exe

4 - Building the RTL only is not enougth to compile a Symbian OS application. We also need the c++ bindings which connect our RTL to the Symbian libraries.

4.1 - To build the bindings you will need the helper application called mksymbian. Please download it with subversion using this command: 

svn co https://p-tools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/p-tools/mksymbian mksymbian

4.2 - Next compile mksymbian. There is a lazarus project to help building it, but directly calling the compiler from command line should work just as well.

4.3 - Copy the mksymbian executable to the fpc/rtl/symbian/bindings directory, open a console, go to the fpc/rtl/symbian/bindings directory and type this command:

mksymbian bindings

4.4 - Copy the resulting .o file(s) to where your symbian os RTL is located. On our example it´s on: C:\Programas\fpc21\rtl\units\i386-symbian

5 - Next you can go to the session "Building Symbian OS Applications" bellow, to learn how to use your compiler to generate a Object Pascal software for Symbian.

The Symbian OS RTL will be located at: C:\Programas\fpc21\rtl\units\i386-symbian

Compiling Free Pascal for the real device

Not yet implemented.


Building Symbian OS Applications

This section is a documentation on the attempt to re-engineer the UIQ 3 build system to a format more friendly to Free Pascal and cross-platform development in general.

Default SDK Build Process

Two commands are executed when building UIQ 3 software for the emulator. Suppose your UIQ SDK is installed on c:\Symbian\UIQ3SDK and your software C++ source code is on C:\QHelloWorld\src.

On C++ you should enter the directory C:\QHelloWorld\group where the build file is located (bld.inf), and type: 

bldmake bldfiles
abld build winscw udeb

The first command will:

  • Generate the directory: C:\Symbian\UIQ3SDK\epoc32\BUILD\Programas\SymbianOS\QHelloWorld\group
  • Fill it with many Makefiles
  • Create a ABLD.BAT script
  • Perl files involved: bldmake.pl

The second command will:

  • Generate the directory: C:\Symbian\UIQ3SDK\epoc32\BUILD\Programas\SymbianOS\QHelloWorld\group\QHELLOWORLD\WINSCW
  • There it will put the source code, a QHELLOWORLD.WINSCW file and a UDEB directory with compiled .o files for the software
  • It will also create a executable (QHelloWorld.exe) for the software on the directory: C:\Symbian\UIQ3SDK\epoc32\release\winscw\udeb
  • Perl files involved: abld.pl makmake.pl

Modifyed Build Process

To aid on this complex build process, a command line tool called "mksymbian" will be created.

Default UIQ build process expects that the source be on a rather peculiar directory format. This is unsuitable for cross-platform development. Just imagine if each OS required a different directory tree, cross-platform would be impossible. Instead we will change this to simply require that the project be the only project on it´s directory. This is already required by many tools, like make, so it should be a flexible enougth restriction for cross-platform.

On the folder of the project you should have source code and also a project information file. This file is in INI format, and specifies many information for our tool to use to build the project. The file must be called "mksymbian.ini"

To compile a C++ project with it you can do:

mksymbian cpp

This is just utilized to show that the tool produces correct output, as our objetive here is to build Object Pascal software.

One important task of this build tool is identifying correctly where Symbian SDKs and Free Pascal are installed.

Using mksymbian

The sintax of this tool is:

mksymbian [action] [project file]

Action can be one of the following:

  • cpp - Compiles a C++ project
  • pascal - Compiles a Object Pascal project
  • bindings - Compiles the pascal bindings for Symbian OS. It supposes that the necessary files are on the location where the command is executed.
  • showpath - Shows the paths found for the Symbian SDKs and Free Pascal. Utilized to check if the tool was able to find the tools.

The project file is a .ini file with many symbian os specific informations about a project, like the UIDs

Target can be one of the following:

  • WinEmulator - Builds for the x86 emulator
  • ArmDevice - Builds a binary for use on PDAs and Smartphones

Note: The tool parameters are not case-sensitive

Registering a application on the UIQ Emulator

Each application should provide a non-localizable resource file with information necessary to register it on the emulator (or later on a real phone). This file ends with the .rss extension and should look similar to this example one: 

// QHelloWorld_reg.rss
#include <AppInfo.rh>

UID2 KUidAppRegistrationResourceFile
UID3 0x01000001

RESOURCE APP_REGISTRATION_INFO
{
	// filename of application binary (minus extension)
	app_file = "QHelloWorld";
}

During the build process this file will be compiled into a .RCS resource file. On the emulator, all registration files should be located on the directory \private\10003a3f\apps

Mksymbian tool will take care of compiling the resource and placing it on the correct position. There next paragraphs on this sections are technical details of how this is done.

Looking at the UIQ 3 SDK directory structure you will find 3 directories that match \private\10003a3f:

  • C:\Programas\UIQ3SDK\epoc32\data\Z\private\10003a3f\apps

Here a copy of your RCS resource file will be put

  • C:\Programas\UIQ3SDK\epoc32\winscw\c\Private\10003a3f

This directory contains only some binary files.

  • C:\Programas\UIQ3SDK\epoc32\release\winscw\udeb\Z\private\10003a3f\apps

Here a copy of your RCS resource file will be put, and you can also see RCS files for all other software installed on the emulator.

Screenshots

First pascal symbian os application:

First pascal symbian app.PNG

See Also

External Links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.freepascal.org/index.php?title=SymbianOS&oldid=18544"