I've been subscribing to the Palm-Unix mailing list for several months now, and I don't see that there is a lot of serious application development going on. People want to be able to connect their Palm devices to various Unix/Linux machines, and back up data on the Palm, but there isn't a lot of new development going on.

There is some generic Palm app development that is done from Unix/Linux platforms, using Xcopilot and GCC, but this is actually covered in the Palm Programming book a bit, and indeed one of the example apps in the communications chapter of Palm Programming was developed entirely on Linux, and the authors do go into some detail describing the process.

Do we need more than that at this point? I don't think so. Will we need more than that in the future? Probably. I have an advanced Palm programming proposal under review right now, which I'm a bit skeptical about (I think it's too early), but we'll probably want such a book at some point, and it will probably cover some Unix based programming.

Here's what I anticipate: Network programming based on Win32 style winsock programming is a dubious proposition at best, and Palm chose not to go this route. The networking support in the Palm is based on classic Unix style Berkeley sockets. This means that as network programming becomes a more important part of Palm application development, Unix/Linux will become more important as a base development platform, simply because it better matches the native networking code on the Palm.

But all this is about six months away from being really mature. I suspect that interest will increase dramatically with the release of Palm's next device: the "Razor", or whatever they're calling it. I'm monitoring it, and prepared to move quickly when the time seems right.

--Mark

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