Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Handheld Development Environments

As we said earlier, the good news is that there are many different development tools available for Palm programming. There is everything from a collection of tools that let you write C code to polished forms-based packages that require only modest amounts of scripting. From this gamut of choices, you should be able to pick the right tool for the type of application you want to create. Before we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each choice, however, we describe each environment.

For the development of the handheld portion of your Palm application, you can write code on Windows, Unix, or Macintosh platforms. Palm’s official development environment, CodeWarrior, is available for both Windows and Macintosh. Unix and Windows programmers have access to a free set of tools—PRC-Tools based on the GNU C compiler, or GCC—and there are packages for Windows-based form development. Last, but not least, programmers can use 68K assembler or other languages.

CodeWarrior for Palm OS

The official development environment for the Palm OS is Metrowerks’s CodeWarrior for Palm OS. This allows you to create ANSI C and C++ programs on either Windows or Macintosh systems. CodeWarrior for Palm OS costs approximately $369. Here is a description of the tools that it gives you for Palm OS development:

Constructor for Palm OS

Constructor is a graphical resource editor that you use to create the UI elements of your application (see Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2. Creating ...