Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Palm OS Sources

A useful resource provided by Palm is an abridged version of the Palm OS source code. This is available from Palm and contains code to almost the entire OS. The lowest-level kernel and communications code are omitted.

In order to obtain the sources, you do need to execute a fairly involved license agreement (in part, specifying that you’ll only use the source code for debugging your Palm OS application). There is no fee involved, although obtaining, executing, and returning the license to Palm takes a bit of time. If you want to be a serious Palm OS application programmer, however, you should obtain the OS source.

The OS sources can help in the following ways:

They are useful to figure out why a fatal alert is occurring.

Before source code was available, a common programmer question was “My program crashes with error blah-blah, File MemMgr.c, Line 1234; what’s wrong?” A Palm engineer would then open up the MemMgr.c file from the Palm OS source code, go to line 1234, and look at the call to the error manager there. The engineer would then report back to the programmer the circumstances under which the error manager was called. Now, you can handle the debugging problem without waiting around for help from someone at Palm.

It’s easier to deal with imperfect documentation.

Although the Palm OS documentation is good (and getting better all the time!), cases occur where the documentation is confusing, missing, misleading, or wrong. Having the ability to go directly to the ...