Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Conduit Development

If you are creating a conduit for your Palm application, you need to do so on Macintosh or Windows using Palm’s Conduit SDK. The Conduit SDK comes with the following:

• Header files

• Libraries

• DLLs

• Frameworks

• Source code for sample conduits

What Is a Conduit?

Under Windows, a conduit is a dynamic link library (DLL) that is called when a HotSync occurs. An install DLL is provided for you to register your conduit with HotSync. On Mac OS, a conduit is a shared library.

Conduits have access to databases on the Palm OS. The Sync Manager handles the complexities of communication; it is not your concern. You simply call routines to read and write records in the database. The Sync Manager handles the communication protocol.

Using C/C++

In order to develop conduits for Windows, use a compiler that can generate 32-bit DLLs (the compilers supported by Palm are Visual C++ 6.0 or Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Windows). For Mac OS, you can use any development environment that has the ability to create shared libraries (CodeWarrior for Mac OS is a likely candidate).

C++ classes that simplify creating a synchronization conduit are provided by Palm (Generic Conduit Framework). These C++ classes are the basis of a number of sample conduits. As your application’s syncing needs differ from what is provided by the Generic Conduit Framework, the C++ classes become less useful, and you might wish to consider reverting to the underlying C/C++ Conduit Manager API to make things work properly.

Using ...