I’ve wanted to try my hand at Palm programming for a while, but have never really gotten into it.
Perhaps part of this is due to the fact that the “official” way to program Palm apps is using C and doing low-level coding of event loops, handlers, and resources (by “official” I mean the way that is supported by Palm and which is the main topic of almost all books on Palm programming).
Well, naturally there are other ways to program Palm. Here are just a few that caught my eye.
Plua looks to be the most promising of the bunch as it is still active (it has a Yahoo group) and already has interesting features like:
- Ability to create simple GUI elements
- Routines for accessing databases and resources
- An abstraction that allows accessing memos, VFS files, databases, and TCP/UDP sockets through the standard file I/O interface
- Ability to develop and compile on the desktop or on the Palm itself, using the SrcEdit source code editor from OnBoardC.
There is even a desktop IDE (written in Java) for Plua called Plural, although I didn’t fall in love with it and I’m gravitating more towards using Emacs with lua-mode.el
See also
- Pippy
- Lua & Plua
- lua.org
- Wikipedia
- Programming in Lua – online book
- Plua homepage
- Plua discussion group (has Plua 2 (Lua 5))
- Plural – Plua desktop IDE
- OnBoard Suite
- LispMe homepage
- Huge list of programming langugages/environments for PalmOS development
Selected books from Amazon
I didn’t know you were interested in Palm programming. I’ll have to give those environments a whirl! (We’ve been stuck in C-land on Palm/PocketPC).
One less common tool that we’ve found useful on Palm is SQLite. While the current port is a bit weak, we’ve did our own port that performs well up to millions of rows (we’re planning on making it publically available once we clean it up). I suspect that you would be able to compile bindings for SQLite and Python, Scheme or Lua, which would make for a fun set of tools.
You missed the obvious one: Java!
Welcome to Palm programming! 🙂
I used CodeWarriorLite from MetroWerks like 3 yrs ago and then later moved on to using cygwin with PilRC to get rid of the nasty dialog that pops up in apps compiled with CodeWarriorLite.
Using the two in combo, CodeWarriorLite to get the GUI and layout done, while using notepad++ and cygwin /w PilRC to compile worked for me.
Once you get past the event based coding, which is found in many other systems (eg Windows (OS), X11(GUI shell) etc), it is fairly easy to code.
Have fun!
Thanks for the update, Marc.
It seems there are a few IDE’s being used for Palm development, but the majority are using CodeWarrior.
Thanks again, Marc.