Description:
The word "empalmable" does not yet exist (and probably won't since spell checkers would replace it with something mortifying) but if it did, Pendragon's developers/writers Debra Sancho and Ivan Phillips would be the "empalmers" to the masses. Their lucid text, The Official Pendragon Forms for PalmOS Starter Kit, introduces do-it-yourselfers, who see the promise of PalmOS applications but lack certain resources, to a software development solution that allows one to build PalmOS applications from scratch. Pendragon Forms is akin to a scripting environment for PalmOS applications. Form style and internal data manipulation are constructed with the Pendragon tool kit on the PC side of the application, which uses Visual Basic for data manipulation. The PalmOS hot synchronization mechanism loads the Pendragon product and accompanying forms/scripts and (optionally) data records into the Palm device. With subsequent synchronizing, the new user entered data passes from the palm device to the host computer for entry into a permanent database. No form exists without the core proprietary Forms software, so no form could be considered, or used, as its own standalone application. Sancho and Phillips are refreshingly candid about Pendragon's limitations. They provide a list of feasible as well as unlikely tasks in their opening chapter: yes, one can create user interfaces for recording on-the-spot selections from fixed lists or user generated text; yes, one can perform simple mathematical calculations (e.g., sums, averages); no, one can not synchronize collected data to an HTML/httpd server. The Official Pendragon Forms for PalmOS Starter Kit is half the bulk of modern how-to texts with twice the content. Weighing in at just under 400 pages, the authors cover installation, form design strategies, ODBC interfaces to common commercial databases, and security issues. The text is copiously illustrated with PalmOS user interface design examples, screen dumps of the form-development environment on the PC side, and figures of the data entry/user interface environment on the PalmOS side. Tips, notes, warnings, and side bars do a masterful job of complementing the text. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing an evaluation copy of Pendragon Forms 3.0 distribution. --Peter Leopold
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