Coming Soon: CW Enterprise Edition
We just finished engineering work today on our new product, CodeWarrior for Palm OS development tools, Version 8, Enterprise Edition. I like to call it CWP8EE for short. This has been a big undertaking for our team, working since January to put together this enhanced version of our V8 product. It should be hitting the distribution channel around April 10th.
This product is mainly an exercise in bundling. We took our V8 tools, patched up to version 8.2, then we added the Win32 tools from CodeWarrior Professional 7. In a past life, I was the compiler engineer for this product, and my replacement has done great things to improve it. This is a complete toolset for writing Win32 programs and DLLs, using standard libraries, MFC, and Direct X.
The new engineering work on the Win32 side is our Palm OS Conduit wizard. In collaboration with Neil Rhodes, famous Palm OS book author, we developed our own wizard to let you quickly generate a conduit based on direct calls to SyncManager (for one-way) or using the generic conduit framework provided by Palm (for two-way). Plus, since you're building conduit DLLs using CW, you don't have all the debugging obstacles people using VC++ to make their DLLs have when the versions of MFC they use don't get along.
By putting the conduit build tools in the same IDE as the Palm OS build tools, you can make super projects that build both parts, and reuse source and headers describing your data structures. We're planning on enhancing this further in the future with automatic conduit registration at the end of a build.
On the Palm OS side, the big change is the integration of the Object Library for Palm OS (POL) with CodeWarrior. POL is installed into the "CW for Palm OS Support" folder, we have the library help linked into the IDE, and we've built a wizard to generate new POL applications. I'm really happy with the wizard; it has similar features to our application wizard, but gives you the ability to pick a set of dialogs to support and customize the names of files and classes that get generated. This is the first step towards full RAD code generation that we're working on for future version of CWPalm.
The other big part of CWP8EE is the database SDK integration. The product ships with database and client-server software from iAnywhere, Extended Systems, and Palm (through their recently acquired ThinAirApps group). Each of these systems has unique abilities to enhance Palm OS programming. iAnywhere's mobile database analyser technology lets you use embedded SQL statements in your code, and it gives you a nice relational DB on the device with a good synchronization strategy back to your big-iron DBs. Extended System's XTNDConnect software works well for remote services, providing an object-based interface to designing applications, with device-based apps using services on application servers. Finally, the ThinAirApps enterprise SDK focuses on wireless performance and security, with an embedded DB on the device and a DB proxy server that you can deploy to the public network.
The product isn't cheap, but we think it offers good value in the enterprise space. Right now, we've got a $300 discount on it through April 10th, the launch date; that makes it $1000 for new purchasers or $500 for people with V8 already. We don't have a specific upgrade price from V7, but its really $750 -- the price of updating to V8, then the cost of updating to V8EE.
This updates been more of an ad than usual... I'm sorry about that, but I wanted to tell the story of what I've been up to lately, and I hope that if this seems useful, you'll check it out.
Send feedback to combee@techwood.org
Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
Palm OS is a registered trademark of PalmSource, Inc.
Metrowerks and CodeWarrior are registered trademarks of Metrowerks Inc.
The views expressed on this website/weblog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of PalmSource or Metrowerks.
qwertYAK / frobnovich
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