SymTorrent and GridTorrent: Developing BitTorrent Clients on the Symbian Platform

This chapter aims to give an insight into how a complex peer‐to‐peer (P2P) application can be created on Symbian OS using C++. It focuses on BitTorent, which is one of today's most important P2P protocols. In addition to giving a short overview of the main concepts behind BitTorrent, two actual Symbian OS clients are introduced. SymTorrent and GridTorrent are the only Symbian OS BitTorrent clients to date. Through code snippets from these applications, many programming topics are covered, such as networking, sockets, and using the HTTP framework of Symbian OS. Since we do not go into the actual protocol implementation, but instead focus on the more general concepts, most of the topics covered here can be reused in any application using networking.