WRT Widgets and Aptana Studio

Web runtime and widgets seem to be quite a hot topic at the moment so I will probably write some introductory post about widgets later. However, now I am going to take a look at the available tools from Nokia for widget creation. If you don't know anything about web runtime or widgets you might want to familiarize yourself with them before reading this. I'm not going to any deep detail here though.

Nokia recently announced The Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio. Aptana Studio is a popular web-development environment that offers integrated language support for HTML, DOM, JavaScript, and CSS technologies. Aptana Studio is available free of charge under an open source licence and is based on the Eclipse framework. The Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio provides features that enable the creation, editing, testing, and deployment of WRT widgets from within Aptana Studio.

The plugin allows you to preview widgets created for WRT 1.0 and also have code completion for that. You can also develop widgets for S60 5th Edition and WRT 1.1 but the Platform Service APIs are not included in the plugin, so the autocomplete feature will not work for the API functions. Also, widgets using the Platform Service APIs must be tested using the S60 5th Edition emulator. Hopefully we'll see a full WRT 1.1 support in the plugin sometime soon.

The Forum Nokia pages say that the installation of the Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio isn’t supported if you are running the Eclipse IDE and using the Aptana Studio Plugin. However, since Aptana is Eclipse based, I found installing the WRT Plugin actually possible. In case you have done some S60 C++ development or maybe Java development, you already might have Eclipse or Carbide.c++ installed. In this case you might not want to install the standalone version of Aptana Studio. I used my existing Carbide.c++ installation and added the Aptana Studio Plugin and the Nokia WRT Plugin on top of that. EDIT: I noticed that only parts of the WRT Plugin will work with Eclipse/Carbide so installing the standalone version of Aptana Studio is recommended. You can still do widget development in Eclipse/Carbide but your tools will be limited.

This is an optional part if you don't want to install the standalone version of Aptana Studio. In your Eclipse/Carbide.c++ installation you can add new update sites to download extension for Eclipse. Add http://update.aptana.com/update/studio/3.2/ as an update site. You can find this from the menu path Help > Software Updates > Find and Install. Select Search for new features to install and New Remote Site.




Confirm and accept the license agreement that follows. You'll also need to accept installation of some components and finally restart Eclipse. After the restart Aptana plugin wants to install Aptana Subversion Support. Install that as well and restart again.

After restart, your installation should have a My Aptana tab open. This is also the case if you have a standalone version of Aptana Studio. Select Plugins and you should find Nokia WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio. Get it. (Alternatively, you could add http://release.aptana.com/install/nokia1.0/ as a new update site and install the WRT plugin that way.)

Installing the WRT plugin will add a new item in your development environment's projects. You should now see Web Runtime (S60) under File > New > Project. Creating a new project with this wizard will create the minimum set of required files for developing a web runtime widget.

You can easily validate, package and deploy a widget from the project context menu.


The widget can be deployed to either an S60 device via Bluetooth or to S60 3rd FP2 or S60 5th Edition emulator.



Once you have deployed the widget package to the emulator environment you have to locate the wgz file from the File Manager application and install it. The widget package can be found from C:\Other.

You will probably also want to enable debugging facilities for JavaScript. This can be done by activating script logging from S60 browser settings (General > Java/ECMA Script errors).