[christee]

I am a student from Norway and I am attending a course called Location Aware Systems. Some of us are going to make applications for S60 phones, and some will do this using python.

There are some of us that would like to be able to send MMS using python, but this is not possible at the moment. Is there someone here that knows of an mms extension out there? Or maybe someone here knows if the developers of python for series 60 har started making an extension for this?

[dcrocha]

Hi,

I'd suggest you sending a message to the user "eriksmartt", as he is one of the responsibles for the project within Nokia.

The other one is Jukka Laurila

Daniel

[christee]

It seems the administrator has disabled pm's, and the user has disabled the "send mail to this user" function. Hopefully eriksmartt will read this thread and reply.

[jplauril]

Sorry, but we're not planning to implement MMS messaging support in the near future. If anyone else would like to prototype something then go right ahead.

[christee]

Bummer. Is there any special reason for that? I have seen some wishlists around and MMS is always listed.

If I were to try and make a prototype for this, could you maybe point me in the right direction? Maybe you have some template code that you use when making new modules so I could have something to start with?

[jplauril]

No, there isn't any special reason. It's just that we have a wishlist that is a mile long, we have to prioritize things according to utility and difficulty and the last time we checked implementing proper MMS support seemed fairly complex. You could of course aim for something simpler at first.

If you want to make a new module, then the modules in the current source distribution are good examples.

[christee]

Well, if you guys thinks it looked complex, I guess it would be pretty stupid of me to try. But hell, I've done stupid things before.

[otsov]

Originally Posted by christee

If I were to try and make a prototype for this, could you maybe point me in the right direction? Maybe you have some template code that you use when making new modules so I could have something to start with?

Take a look at the "inbox" extension. If I remember correctly, the SMS specific things or better, where you should add support for emails and/or MMSes, are already commented in the source. See also the examples pointed in the source code. This might be a good place to start:

http://www.symbian.com/developer/tec.../mms_part2.pdf

Start with a simple hard coded example MMS with only text in it, modify e.g. "inbox" in the beginning and add the relevant code from the above link.

[christee]

Originally Posted by otsov

Take a look at the "inbox" extension. If I remember correctly, the SMS specific things or better, where you should add support for emails and/or MMSes, are already commented in the source. See also the examples pointed in the source code. This might be a good place to start:

http://www.symbian.com/developer/tec.../mms_part2.pdf

Start with a simple hard coded example MMS with only text in it, modify e.g. "inbox" in the beginning and add the relevant code from the above link.

Thanks for the tip.

[eriksmartt]

Bummer that PM's are disabled since the thread was specifically asking for me. Fortunately, jplauril and otsov have already addressed the issue.

Just to reiterate, MMS was low on the wishlist given it's complexity and limited use, and because there were other priorities that came up higher (ex., send and receive SMS were heavily requested.) The Java guys are getting MMS though (through JSR 205), and it will be interesting to see if the new API's drive MMS adoption.

For the time being, the unfortunate (or fortunate, depending how you look at it) answer is that MMS isn't being worked on by the folks here, but the source code is available and the MMS C++ API's could be exposed. No easy task.. but it's technically feasible.

[christee]

I took a glance at the MMS part of the C++ API the other day. I have written some C++ before but I consider myself very novice. It did not take long before I saw that this was way to much for me. I guess I will have to try to figure out other ways of sending an mms.

One idea I had was to simply write an MMS sender in maybe java that could take some arguments and simply send the MMS. Could something like this work?

One could generate an MMS in a python application and "send" it to a java application that actually sends the MMS? Excuse my crappy explanation for the idea.

[kari.kujansuu]

I have succeeded in sending an MMS message from Python. See http://nysse.lapanen.org/python/MMS/. This is a native extension with minimal functionality - it can send a message with one file attachment. Note that I am a novice in Symbian programming - use at your own risk...

[cyke64]

great

Many are waiting for this feature
But why use this :
[code]
# mmsmodule named as MMSMODULE.PYD (ALL in uppercase !)
import mmsmodule
[code]

Could you explain this to me ?

[jplauril]

cyke64, I can perhaps explain: the Symbian file system is case insensitive but case preserving. Python will find the .pyd regardless of the case of the filename.

[jplauril]

kari.kujansuu: Nice work!

One fix is in order, though: You should release the interpreter lock before entering the Active Scheduler and reacquire it when you return from it. Whenever you call CActiveScheduler::Start() in a Python extension you should do this (unless you _really_ know what you are doing):

    Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS
    CActiveScheduler::Start();
    Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS

The source code of existing extensions has examples of this technique. See e.g. src/ext/messaging/messagingmodule.cpp.