P.I.P.S. – ‘PIPS is POSIX on Symbian’- enables easy migration of desktop and server applications to smartphones

The move will help broaden and deepen application development for Symbian OS and help improve developer productivity. Symbian OS is the market leading operating system for smartphones.

P.I.P.S. - PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian - will enable C programmers to more easily migrate existing middleware and applications, either commercial or open source, to Symbian OS by providing standard POSIX C APIs on Symbian OS. This has been achieved by supplying a new framework of POSIX C APIs for use by both C and C++ programmers. The new APIs are packaged into industry standard libraries - libc, libm, libpthread and libdl - and are tightly integrated with Symbian OS to optimise performance and memory usage. In addition, an updated tool chain will further reduce migration effort.

“Symbian smartphones are becoming increasingly powerful, and it is now realistic and desirable to migrate desktop and server code onto mobile devices, opening up exciting possibilities and attracting differently skilled developers to the Symbian ecosystem”, said Jørgen Behrens, executive vice-president, marketing, Symbian. “With P.I.P.S., Symbian further demonstrates its commitment to open standards in the industry.”

POSIX support is a natural step for Symbian which will allow an ever increasing number of popular desktop middleware and applications such as web servers and file sharing software as well as applications based on other mobile operating systems to be easily ported to Symbian OS. With over 100 million Symbian smartphones in the market, P.I.P.S. makes it even more compelling for developers to target Symbian OS.

“P.I.P.S. is part of Symbian’s ongoing investment to enhance the development experience on Symbian OS,” said Bruce Carney, head of developer marketing, Symbian. “Native Symbian C++ continues to offer the richest set of APIs for smartphone functionality, with Symbian also enabling familiar frameworks, virtual machines and run-time-environments such as POSIX, Crossfire, Java, Python, Flash and OPL to help move any developer onto the market’s leading and richest mobile OS. In addition, the market momentum for smartphones is growing quickly, making it even more attractive to move to mobile and Symbian OS.“

Commenting on the announcement’s implications for developer productivity, IBM Software Group’s Dr. Michael Karasick, Director of Development, Client Platforms and Technologies, said, “Supporting open standards such as a POSIX layer for Symbian OS is a key part of our commitment to our customers. Using POSIX, IBM developers are given a simplified approach to porting customer solutions across a variety of platforms, now including Symbian OS, which is a very important platform for us.”

A beta version of P.I.P.S. will be available for Symbian OS v9.1 and above as a downloadable .SIS file from the Symbian Developer Network http://developer.symbian.com/ by the end of Q1 2007.

P.I.P.S. includes the following libraries:

• libc – The “C Standard Library” with system APIs mapped to Symbian OS APIs for better performance
• libm – A mathematical library
• libpthread – Implements POSIX-style threading support in terms of the underlying Symbian OS thread support
• libdl – Implements POSIX-style dynamic linking which extends the dynamic loading model of Symbian OS