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Palm Database Programming The Electronic Version
Chapter 1: Introduction
This material was published in 1999. See the free
Palm OS Programming
online course I developed for
CodeWarriorU for some updated material.
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Contents
Why Read This Book?
If you haven't realized it yet, there's a wealth of programming
information available for you to download from the Palm Computing Web
site. You can download a complete reference guide to the Palm
operating system in Adobe PDF format, suitable for online browsing or
printing. You can also download tutorials and whitepapers, as well as
tools and software development kits.
So why read this book? There are two reasons.
First, it's a concise introduction to Palm programming. While
there's nothing stopping you from downloading the Palm reference guide
(it's also included on the CD-ROM) and reading it from front to back,
it's not the easiest way to learn about the platform. The reference
guide presents too much information to be an overview, and the answers
to many of the questions you ask yourself as a novice are either
scattered throughout the document or else not addressed at all. This
book covers the basics to get you started and then shows you where to
go to get the information you need later on.
Second, this book introduces you to database programming for the
Palm platform. Databases are a vital part of any organization, whether
they are large relational databases or small desktop databases. Your
applications need to interact with these external databases, to allow
users to download and browse data on their Palm devices. If a user
changes any of the information, those changes have to be uploaded back
to the database. Writing programs that do all of this is quite a
challenge because you need to know how to select and update data from
an external database, how to write programs for the Palm platform, and
how to synchronize the data between the device and the external
database. The required combination of database programming experience,
platform knowledge, and user interface design skills is rare. This
book fills in the gaps you might have in any of those areas.
This book is not a guide to using your Palm device.
There are several good books available that explain how to use a Palm
device, and if you've never actually used one before, you should take
some time to explore the device before you start programming it —
it will make you a better programmer.
It's also important to note that this book is not a guide to
conduit programming, either, although the topic is briefly discussed
in Chapter 3. Conduits run on non-Palm platforms and are developed
with a different set of tools — you can even develop
conduits in Java instead of C++. But both Sybase and Oracle provide
solutions for synchronizing data with an external database, and any
conduit you write would really be duplicating their efforts. Data
synchronization is a complicated problem, as you'll see in Chapter 7.
You're probably already using third-party conduits such as EasySync or
IntelliSync to synchronize the built-in applications with your desktop
software, and this book assumes you'd rather use precanned database
connectivity solutions, whether they be from Sybase, Oracle, or some
other vendor.
Eric's Comments: Remember, only Chapters 1 through 5
are republished here. |
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Contents
Copyright ©1999 by Eric Giguere. All rights reserved.
From Palm Database Programming: The Complete Developer's Guide.
Reprinted here with permission from the publisher. Please see the
copyright
and disclaimer notices for more details.
If you find the material useful, consider buying one of
my books,
linking to this site from your own site or in your weblog,
or sending me a note.
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