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 Review:Palm Programming - the Developer's Guide |
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Jonathan Blocksom has taken some time out of his holidays to send over a review of Neil Rhodes & Julie McKeehan's (Mark Stone, Ed.) Palm Programming - the Developer's Guide. Click below to find out how to make your Pilot fly even faster.
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The Scenario
So you want to write an application for your Palm Pilot. Maybe none of the apps out there scratch your particular itch or maybe your company is issuing Palm III's to the sales force and you've got to interface them with the company's database. Either way, you could download the 3-part, 900 page Palm OS 3.0 Reference Manual and start wading, or you could go out and get this book.
Those who don't own a Palm OS device like the Palm Pilot or Palm III may not know that the devices have a proprietary serial port that plugs into a small cradle or cable to hook up to your desktop computer. You plug in the PDA and hit the cradle's HotSync button, and the desktop computer runs software to synchronize the desktop and palm databases. Palm devices can also hook up to things like modems, GPSes, or bar scanners, making them very versatile appliances.
A Snapshot of Palm Development
Palm apps have up to three components: the forms, the application, and the conduit. The forms are the user interface elements, which are compiled along with the application source to make the executable that gets loaded onto the Palm device. The conduit is an optional software component which resides on the desktop computer and gets executed when you HotSync your Palm device. The desktop software that comes with the Palm Pilot has conduits which take care of mirroring the Palm and desktop databases and sending email written offline on the pilot. Conduits for other programs might do things like fetch a page off the web and download it to the Pilot, or upload data collected on the pilot to a company database.Development for Palm OS is done in standard C with either the GNU SDK (available for Linux and Windows) or Metrowerks CodeWarrior (Windows and Mac). CodeWarrior provides a graphical GUI editor, whereas the GNU SDK relies on a text file description. Conduits are developed in C++; the Conduit Development Kit development is currently only available on Windows, although a Mac CDK is in alpha. Debugging of Palm applications is done using the Palm OS Emulator (POSE), a standalone program for all three platforms that simulates a Palm pilot on your screen. For the record, this reviewer develops on Windows with the GNU tools and Codewright as a front end.
What's Good?
The book has a well organized tutorial format and is very easy to follow. The topics are presented in a sensible order, and they also stand well on their own for those who like to jump around. Databases, which are to Palm devices what files are to desktop computers, are explained thoroughly and the book makes programming with them seem far less frightening than it does when you just read the reference manuals.
The example source code the book uses is also well presented. It refrains from full program listings (a CD accompanying the book has all the source code) but it still presents complete routines where appropriate. The listings are integrated with the text and there is none of that annoying "See listing 5.3" stuff. The code itself is well written and easily understood.
Many of the topics in the book contain handy checklists for implementing and testing, such as global find capability or IR communications. The book also goes over serial communications and TCP/IP interfacing, which will certainly come in handy for Palm VII developers. A full third of the book is dedicated to conduit development, certainly a godsend for those writing them.
One great thing about the book is that it covers all the major Palm development platforms. It is even-handed and considers the pros and cons of each; for example, although it usually reccommends resource creation using CodeWarrior's GUI form designer, it prefers textfile based tools for menu creation like those in the GNU SDK. It also covers debugging using the emulator with CodeWarrior and the GNU tools, and provides step by step instructions for getting it up and running. Unfortunately, POSE is not available for Linux, so debugging under Linux is not covered, though copilot (an older version of POSE) for Linux is included on the CD.
What's Bad?
If you read the book from start to finish you'd probably think that you knew everything about Palm OS development, but unfortunately there are a few important topics the book seems to miss. Floating point numbers are mentioned only in passing; floats were not supported in early versions of the Palm Pilot, but now floats are available with basic arithmatic operations. There is no standard Palm math library for floats, but there is a GNU library out there that implements the standard math library. A discussion of the hoop jumping involved to use it and including the library on the CD would make sense.
Graphics and sound are also not mentioned, which is disappointing and strange considering the number of games that people have written. Alarms and system preferences are also somewhat tricky subjects that might fit in well with the sample sales database application. There is also no mention of "hacks", an unfortunate name for the more or less standard method of adding extensions to the OS via a program called HackMaster. This is an advanced topic and something that is not really supported by 3Com, so it is understandable that it is left out.
Fortunately there are plenty of resources out there for people who want to do this stuff, so you're not out of luck if you're writing an app that uses these things. The Palm computing platform will also be around for quite a while, so we will probably see these topics addressed in future revisions of the book.
So What's In It For Me?
If you want to do any Palm development, this book will make it a lot less painful. The CD that comes with it contains software for all three OSes to get you started with development. It includes CodeWarrior Lite (cannot create new projects) for Mac and Windows and the GNU SDK for Linux and Windows. It also contains the Palm OS 3.0 documentation, the Palm OS Emulator, and source code for all of the books examples. The book also gives URLs for finding the latest versions of these tools -- useful in particular for the Palm OS Debug ROM images which must be downloaded from 3Com to use the Palm OS emulator.
There's also the O'Reilly Palm Programming Contest, which has been mentioned on slashdot before, and offers as prizes various amounts of cash and free Palm devices (probably not the Palm VII). This book is certainly the quickest way to get up to speed for writing those Palm OS killer apps!
Buy this book over here.
Relevant Links
- 3Com Palm Computing Platform Development Zone - tools, documentation and support straight from the horse's mouth.
- Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Palm OS
- GNU Pilot SDK Links
- The O'Reilly Palm Pilot Center, and their catalog listing for this book
- The O'Reilly Programming Contest - win a Palm III!
- Face Painter - The author's first Palm OS app. Much of this was developed before I owned the book.
Table of Contents
Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide | ||
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I. Palm-Why It Works and how to Program It 1. The Palm Solution
2. Development Environments and Languages
3. Designing a Solution
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II. Designing Palm Applications 4. Structure of an Application
5. Forms and Form Objects
6. Databases
7. Menus
8. Extras
9. Communications
10. Debugging Palm Applications
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III. Designing Conduits 11. Getting Started with Conduits
12. Uploading and Downloading Data with a Conduit
13. Two-way Syncing
14. Debugging Conduits
A. Where To Go From Here Index |
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