European Wafaa

I'm an avid user, fan and proponent of the Symbian operating system for mobile phones. There are many reasons I like Symbian, and yes I know a lot of people think it is outdated irrelevant and is marked for the death knell. Personally I think those that think so are wrong, but are completely entitled to their opinion

One great thing about Symbian is that you can easily write applications for it, using the Web Run Time widget as your means. I'm not saying it's better than applications written in any of the available languages - C++, Qt, Python, Ruby, .Net, Java ME, Flash Lite. No "jail breaking" or hackery is needed to use any of these languages, just choose your preferred language and have fun.

Anyway back to topic - creating apps or widgets using WRT. The first thing is to go and grab the best IDE for the job - Aptana Studio. Yes I know there are a million and one IDEs out there, but Aptana just works and makes it so simple to do the job! You can use standard Eclipse if you wish, just add the plugin (see the website for details). So how does one use Studio on Linux? Well it is almost the same as one would on any other platform, be it Windows or Mac. The only difference is there is no package to install per se.

1.) Make sure you have mozilla-xulrunner181 installed. A simple zypper in mozilla-xulrunner181 should do the trick.
2.) Simply download Aptana Studio - Stand Alone version (latest version as of this post is 2.0).
3.) Extract the downloaded tarball to your desired location, I used ~/bin. You can re-name the resulting directory anything you wish, as I follow the KISS methodology I kept it simple because I'm fairly stupid at times and re-named it AptanaStudio2.0.
4.) Create a little script that is in your $PATH and name it something, thankfully in openSUSE ~/bin is in there so that's where I placed mine (called Aptana):
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1
/PATH/TO/EXTRACTED/TARBALL/AptanaStudio
Ensure it is executable.
5.) I then created a desktop icon, pointing to the above script, and used the nice .xpm icon that is in the extracted tarball.
6.) Now you are ready to fire it up, you can either use you desktop launcher or as the launch script is in you path you can just Alt+F2 and type the name of you launcher script.
7.) Once launched select Plugins from the home screen and go to "Featured", there you will see the Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio. Select "Get It" and follow the simple oncreen prompts.

Once Aptana restarts you are ready to create you widgets. Look at the Symbian Developer site for more details on how to create widgets or simply create a new project and imprt a widget to have a look. So now that you have the tools, how about someone help me and get the "openSUSE on Symbian" widget up to scratch?