Programming Visual Basic for the Palm OS

Building a Large Application

Our simple example glossed over many design and implementation issues encountered when building large or complex applications. In this section, we build a more complete example that covers these issues. In particular, we look at HTML 3.2 limitations and extensions in the Palm WCA viewer, application partitioning, security, and access control, as well as some basic user interface techniques that work well on the Palm.

As we discuss these design topics and present the details of a larger application, we will work in other important details of Clipping application development using VB. Our focus is how to develop the HTML and ASP code necessary to produce good distributed applications. When necessary, we will go into the details of COM objects and the SQL database to make a point.

Tip

There are many other techniques, such as the use of XML data and XSL templates or Microsoft Transaction Server components, which aid the development of efficient ASP applications. However, we will not cover development using these tools here.

The large example project for this chapter, Ch6b, is an application designed for a hypothetical company that has field technicians performing jobs at client sites. The technicians of our hypothetical company can use Ch6b to check their daily job schedule, review customer information, and update work orders in real time. The managers use Ch6b to check on the progress of customer jobs throughout the day.

Obviously, such an application could ...