The significance is that Symbian 9 represents a clear break with previous versions, because it is not fully backwards compatible.
AppForge’s offering called Crossfire, which already supports earlier Symbian versions plus Blackberry and Windows mobile devices, is now adding Symbian 9 support. The company claims that the new version of its tool will let you port apps developed for version 8 and earlier Symbian to the latest environment.
AppForge’s tools, which are based on .NET, enable developers to work in Visual Basic.NET or C# to develop apps that can run on any of these mobile targets. The Crossfire run time then takes care of deployment on the target.
The latest version provides several other goodies, including a connection manager that can dynamically connect or disconnect sessions. That can be critical when using applications such as mobile banking or travel reservations, where the intermittent connectivity of the mobile environment can otherwise wreak havoc with your session. The feature can maintain processes such as authentication or selectively cache data to maintain the flow of interactions.
The new release, version 6.5, is also adding support of web services, so developers can call external processes. Other odds and ends include support of several additional .NET framework classes, plus Bluetooth support and the ability to embed images and grids for the Blackberry.
For its part, Nokia announced release of Carbide C++, available in developer and professional editions. In contrast to the AppForge tools, which are Microsoft .NET-based, Nokia’s are plug-ins for Eclipse.
The difference between the professional and developer editions is that the professional focuses on high-performance applications, while the developer version is more of a basic productivity IDE (integrated development environment).
Among the bells and whistles are the ability to debug programs on the mobile device itself and a wizard-based UI designer. The debug feature is intended to boost developer productivity by reducing the guesswork of what’s happening when the code is deployed to the phone.
Nokia claims that the latest version of Carbide tooling will work on its latest S60 handset, plus devices form LG Electronics, Lenovo, and Samsung.
The AppForge Crossfire and Nokia Carbide C++ tools are available immediately.
