Khronos API Support

The Symbian platform provides support for a number of APIs created by the Khronos Group (www.khronos.org). This is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. This topic provides a brief summary of the Khronos APIs that are supported in the Symbian platform.

Supported APIs

OpenGL ES

OpenGL is a 2D and 3D graphics API that provides a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other visualization functions. It gives software developers access to geometric and image primitives, display lists, modeling transformations, lighting and texturing, anti-aliasing and blending. OpenGL ES is a subset of OpenGL optimized for 2D and 3D graphics on embedded devices such as mobile phones.

See: OpenGLES Collection

OpenVG

OpenVG is an API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for rendering vector graphics libraries such as Flash and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for user interfaces and text on small screen devices. It does this while enabling hardware acceleration to provide smooth interactive performance at low power levels.

See: OpenVG Collection.

EGL

EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system.

See: EGL Collection

OpenWF Composition

OpenWF Composition (OpenWF-C) provides a hardware abstraction layer that allows power-efficient hardware-accelerated composition on a wide variety of hardware platforms. OpenWF-C is particularly aimed at systems with limited memory bandwidth, such as mobile devices. OpenWF-C enables the UI and the window system stack to be independent of the hardware used to achieve the composition. OpenWF-C is a system-level API that can be ignored by application developers.

Architectural relationships

The following diagram shows the relationships between the Khronos rendering APIs.

Figure 1. Dependencies between the Khronos rendering components

Related concepts

Related information