Nokia’s Carbide Development Suite – A brief overview
Posted by Steven on May 10th, 2006
One of the reasons why Windows Mobile devices have such a market advantage in software development is the vast knowledgebase that programmers have access to and the powerful and easy-to-use development tools available for them (such as Microsoft Visual Studio & Microsoft Embedded C++). Symbian development has always been restricted to a narraw range of professional or enthusiast programmers who do not mind programming at a reasonably low level (usually C++). This is mostly due to the fact that setting up a development suite for such a platform and developing applications for this platform requires quite a bit of expertise and most developers give up very early on.
Carbide is a Symbian developer tool which was developed as an extension to Eclipse by Nokia. This suite provides developers with a clean interface and support for the C++ or J2ME development APIs. For those who are more used to developing applications in Microsoft Visual Studio, Carbide also comes as a Visual Studio extension to enable development of C++ Symbian applications in Visual Studio.
With this new tool, deploying a development suite has never been easier. All you need to do is follow the simple instructions and you can be up and running within half an hour. Alongside Carbide, you will need to have a copy of the sdk for the targeted platform. The platform sdk can be downloaded from the Nokia website and is available for free to all developers.
Once installed carbide will make all the necessary bindings for you automatically and set itself up to best suit your development needs. When creating a new project in Carbide, a set of template classes with pre-configured build files are provided. This makes development a lot smoother because the developer can be coding as of the first minute after creating the project, without the need for long configuration sessions.
This suite enables debugging in the Nokia emulator which comes with the SDK. One feature which I was surprised not to find in it was the support for on-device debugging. On-device debugging is one of the most commonly used techniques for testing applications. Lack of such a feature might be quite a set-back, especially if the programmer needs to test hardware specific routines (e.g. testing a Bluetooth application)
I believe that this suite is best aimed for companies which have small to medium sized projects, or hobbyist programmers. For larger projects it might be wise to look into Metrowerks CodeWarrior which is better suited for larger projects.
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