Palm Database Programming The Electronic Version
Chapter 3: Development Tools and Software Development Kits
This material was published in 1999. See the free
Palm OS Programming
online course I developed for
CodeWarriorU for some updated material.
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The Palm Operating System Emulator
Apart from your compiler, the Palm OS Emulator (usually referred to
as POSE) is arguably the most useful tool in your programming arsenal.
It lets you test and debug your applications on your desktop computer
without having to install them on a Palm device, which is very useful
when you only have one device on which you'd rather not install
alpha-quality software. It's also faster than continually downloading
applications to the device.
A version of POSE ships with CodeWarrior and is also included
separately on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book, but check the
Palm Computing Web site for the most recent version. At the time this
book was written, version 2.0b3 is the latest official release, and
version 2.1d26 is the latest stable release. Both versions are on the
CD-ROM. You should use version 2.1d26 if possible, as it supports more
features and has a number of fixes for bugs in 2.0b3.
History
Before the Emulator arrived, the only way to test a Palm
application on a desktop computer was to link the source with the
Simulator, a set of Macintosh-based libraries that simulated a Palm OS
programming environment. The Simulator was far from perfect and only
ran on the Macintosh.
Greg Hewgill wrote a Palm emulator called Copilot. Copilot was
based on an existing emulator, the Unix Amiga Emulator (UAE), which
allowed you to run Amiga software in a Unix environment. Both the
Amiga and the Palm use the Motorola 68000 series chip as their central
processing units, so the core of UAE could be used with some
modifications to emulate a Palm device.
Copilot was so successful and useful that Palm Computing contacted
the principal developers involved in its creation and took over
development of the emulator for the Windows and Macintosh platforms.
The renamed emulator is downloadable from the Palm Computing Web site.
The original Copilot still exists and has been ported to other
platforms such as Linux and OS/2.
Using the Emulator
POSE emulates a complete Palm Computing platform device. To do this
it requires the Palm OS ROM image. The ROM image does not ship with
POSE, nor is it found on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book.
Instead, you must use a ROM transfer application to transfer the image
from a Palm device onto your desktop computer. You can in fact
download multiple images from different devices, so that you can use
POSE to test your applications against different versions of the
operating system. If you're serious about using POSE, you should also
obtain the debug versions of the ROM images from Palm Computing. The
debug versions perform extra sanity checking and inform you of
potential problems that might cause you grief with future versions of
the operating system. Information on how to obtain these images can be
found on the Palm Computing Web site at
www.palm.com/devzone/pose/pose.html.
Once you've transferred the ROM image, POSE looks and behaves like
a real Palm device, as shown in Figure 3.21. You use the mouse to
simulate pen strokes. This is more cumbersome than using a pen, so the
desktop computer's keyboard can be used to enter characters directly
instead of using Graffiti.
Figure 3.21 The Palm OS Emulator in action.
POSE has its own set of menus (under Windows, POSE does not have a
menubar, so the menus are invoked with a right click on the POSE
window) that allow you to reset the operating system, configure POSE
(to locate the ROM image file and control how much RAM is installed on
the "device"), load applications into the Emulator, perform
HotSyncs (you'll need a null modem cable; see the POSE instructions),
download ROM images, and run some random user interface tests. The
user interface tests are referred to as Gremlins and are a good way to
ensure your applications don't crash upon encountering unexpected user
input.
To load an application, make sure that the Launcher application
(the one that lists all installed applications) isn't active by
launching one of the standard applications such as the Memo Pad. This
avoids a bug where the Launcher doesn't refresh itself properly when
an application is installed or updated. Then select the "Load
app" menu item to load the desired application. Return to the
Launcher and tap on the application's icon to start it, just like you
would on a real device.
If at some point your application crashes, POSE will offer you the
opportunity to debug it or reset the device. With version 2.0b3, if
the application crashes immediately when POSE is reset, you'll need to
terminate POSE as you would any other misbehaving application (for
example, by using the Task Manager under Windows NT). Before
restarting POSE, delete any .RAM files from the POSE installation
directory. This performs the equivalent of a hard reset. Version
2.1d26 users do not have to deal with this problem.
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Copyright ©1999 by Eric Giguere. All rights reserved.
From Palm Database Programming: The Complete Developer's Guide.
Reprinted here with permission from the publisher. Please see the
copyright
and disclaimer notices for more details.
If you find the material useful, consider buying one of
my books,
linking to this site from your own site or in your weblog,
or sending me a note.
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