Mohammad Tayseer

I love clean URLs, for a lot of reasons (that I will not mention here). I always wanted my blog to have clean URLs, so this is how I did it with CommunityServer (which is what we use to manage SpellCoder). In the 'Edit Post' page, go to the 'Options' tab & at the 'Name' field enter the name of the page (as you want it to appear to your blog visitor). Spaces will be replaced by underscore '_'. You can hover over the question mark '?' to know what are the valid characters. Unfortunately, you cannot change the URL to an existing page, which is good & bad at the same time. I don't know why it doesn't allow hyphens '-' in the URL. You can see it being used in http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx, but maybe because they are using a newer version.

Update: All the links are dead now. Symbian is dead!

1. Removed all the good parts of C++: No exception handling. No STL.

2. Stupid alternatives:

   1. They removed exception handling, but they added another feature called Leaving. It is basically like exception handling, but it doesn't unwind the stack!! To get your object deleted, you have to put it on something called the Cleanup Stack which you have to manage manually (This means that we are back to manual new & delete).
   2. The data structures they provide is very hard to use. Just try to use a linked list.

3. Unnecessary MVC: The Model-View-Controller is useful for large application(e.g. web apps, etc), but it's an overkill for small applications. In Symbian, the list box - the most common control - is divided into 5 classes, according to their implementation of the MVC!!

   1. CEikListBox: The controller
   2. MListBoxModel: The model
   3. CListBoxView: Responsible for drawing the list box area which doesn't contain items
   4. CLisItemDrawer: Responsible for drawing the items themselves.
   5. CListItemData: Can you guess what is the role of this one?? If you are not an experienced Symbian programmer, then your guess is wrong. This class is responsible for storing the fonts used for drawing items!!!

4. Premature optimization: They always favor optimization over clarity, even if they want to optimized a single instruction or 4 bytes. They reference strings using offsets, which means that you cannot show them in the debugger arghhhh

   This also made them have 6 classes for strings. see http://newlc.com/String-and-Descriptors.html

5. The documentation is not clear

6. Deprecating APIs in months: They deprecate APIs in months, for no reasons. Sometimes there is an alternative, sometimes there isn't (e.g. Image Conversion Library, Telehpony library, etc)

7. It's hard to write stable systems: As I mentioned above, they provide Leaving. Unfortunately, they don't use it most of the time. What they use most of the time for error reporting is panics. Even when there is a small error (e.g. invalid index), the program panics!! How can you build a stable system if every error will cause the program to abort!!

8. You cannot include more than one table in a single query: In other words, what they say is an RDBMS, is not an RDBMS.

9. Most of the time, you have to reinvent the wheel: They don't follow standards at all. They keep implementing their own standards. First, they didn't support Arabic, so we had to reimplement the support ourselves. Later, they added Arabic, but you have to supply your fonts in .gdr format, not TTF, so we had to port the FreeType ourselves. Later, they added support for TTF fonts, but the problem is that they you cannot add your own special characters to the fonts. On Windows, for example, you can add characters which are not valid unicode characters, but as long as the TTF file has them, they can be viewed. On Symbian, those characters won't appear. Symbian hardcodes the validation of the characters. This is why I had to reimplement the support for Arabic on Symbian!!!

10. People use it only to get jobs: All the people I know who write programs for Symbian do this only because of the low competition!.

11. No good support for on-device debugging: It is there, but it's hard to do.

I will be happy to hear more reasons from you to hate Symbian. I hope this will save some people from this ugly monster.

I have posted about other alternatives here