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Python For Nokia Series 60 Phones Now Available 20

Python for Series 60 has been released on the Forum Nokia website. The release notes included in the package seem to give a fairly realistic image of the current status, and the demo apps and documentation seem to be quite good. The supplied documents even hint that there might be an OpenGL-API in the future. Alas, the emulator package seems to be for Windows only, as are the required S60 SDKs.
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Python For Nokia Series 60 Phones Now Available

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  • How hard is porting a VM to Symbian ...

    I work on a VM myself, would it be possible to port it to Symbian easily (has 500k footprint on ARM) ?.

    And where's the Source dude !!.. I want Nokia to OpenSource it. Where I work, there are guys with p800i smartphone , if they had released sources, I could have taken a shot at building it for Ericsson (maybe that's why they haven't).
    • Basically, Symbian makes everything hard.

      There is some kind of ported standard C library, but it is both lacking and buggy. Also, when using the C library, there are only two symptoms when something goes wrong: either the application crashes or the entire phone crashes. If the software runs differently on PC emulator and the phone, you're pretty much out of luck. Standard C++ is of course a dream far away. Ported STL exists but it has its own set of troubles.
      • *If the software runs differently on PC emulator and the phone, you're pretty much out of luck*

        well. that's where experience comes into play.. and is basically the reason why solid symbian knoweledge could land anyone a job right now(because it is kinda hard).
    • depending on how you have built the vm the port will be easy or extremely hard. (iirc some people have built python for symbian independently of nokia. however, the system/gui libraries are the thing that makes it really worthwhile! so, even if you had source you'd have to go through a lot to get it into being really usable on an uiq device like the p800, or even series80 or series90 from nokia).

      there's some symbian specific things that make porting sometimes hard(even things like how you allocate the memo
  • by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @12:10PM (#11159131) Journal

    I was going to try jython
    (although like many things hadn't got round to it)

    My Nokia 6600 has BSD socket support (which I believe was a first - though naturally I'm prepared to be wrong and no doubt if anyone knows better I will find out soon enough)

    The downside of the 6600 is the "no true networking via bluetooth" crippling. I've tried GNUbox but gave up after no luck.

    I hope the python socket API is present.

    • If you read the release notes, socket support is present:

      socket.py: Adapted to work with the native sockets on the platform

      - getservbyname and getaddrinfo consult a small fixed table instead of an external service map file. Only few services are supported

      - socket method setblocking raises an exception, since only blocking mode is supported in this release. Support for non-blocking mode is in development and should be available in the near future.
    • Re:great news (Score:3, Informative)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      not sure about 'bsd socket support' but socket support is in other s60 phones as well.

      as for the gnubox.. tried to do it with these instructions yet? http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/mraento/symbian/bt-ap. html [helsinki.fi]

  • by Karma Farmer ( 595141 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @12:39PM (#11159480)
    How much physical RAM does Python require? Could its heap be squeezed onto something small like the GBA (32K RAM, comparatively unlimited ROM)?
    • How much physical RAM does Python require? Could its heap be squeezed onto something small like the GBA (32K RAM, comparatively unlimited ROM)?

      The GBA has more RAM than that. It has 32 KB that is so-called "in-chip Work RAM", but according to these specs [fh-hagenberg.at] it also has 256 KB of on-chip work RAM. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I'm sure it can be worked with. After all, people have a gimped-out version of Linux (uClinux) running on the GBA, I'm sure a gimped out port of Pippy could work.

      Pippy
  • by Anonymous Coward
    but the phone would be obsolete before Parrot would be able to run on it. Also, it would need 30M of RAM just to run Parrot.
  • Very much a work in progress, but I've written a scripting language called Hecl [dedasys.com] in Java. It is small enough (40k at the moment) to run on my Nokia 3100, which isn't a Symbian phone.
  • by jplauril ( 67893 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @04:45PM (#11162142)
    ...since I suppose most people never read the articles that are posted just to some subsection.

    But anyway, I'm one of the developers in this project, so if you have any questions or comments then post away and I'll try to answer.

  • No S60 SDK or Windows box is required. Just write your code with emacs and bluetooth it over to the phone.
  • Been waiting for this for a while. You don't seem to need windows to play around with it, you can get the installer files for your phone as a zip file, and get an interactive python on your phone. It seems you can also send .py files across via bluetooth and python will pick them up. (Can't test this yet, I broke my bluetooth adapter...)
  • The nice people at HIIT [pdis.hiit.fi] have made a wxWidgets implementation of the Python for Series 60 appuifw UI widget API, so now you run the same UI code on your desktop machine and on your phone, without needing the Symbian emulator. The code is not quite complete yet, but a lot of stuff _is_ supported. They also released their PyExpat port, which is a good example of how to extend Python for Series 60.

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