Ben Combee wrote:- based on the open-source Eclipse IDE, version 2.1.2 and Eclipse C/C++ Developer Tools, version 1.2.1.
Seeing that Eclipse 3.0 is just around the corner, is there any chance that PODS 1.0 final will be based on that version rather than Eclipse 2.1? I know, it's not really that critical as PODS is a standalone application, but it would still be nice.
No, we will not be updating to Eclipse 3.0 for PODS 1.0. We are tracking progress with Eclipse, and will likely update our plugins once Eclipse 3 and CDT 2 are stable, but since we're focusing on a stable toolset, we won't start planning for this until after PODS 1.0 is complete.
I just gave this new PODS version a test run and I really like what I've seen so far(although I only tried it for about 20 minutes). The first thing I tried out was visual source-level debugging and it seems to be working well, at least for 68K apps.
For new applications, should I start using the XRD format or stick to PilRC for now? Are the XRD format and the resource compiler stable enough for production use? I really like that it's an XML format. I see a wealth of possibilities for automatically generating code using XSL transformations or by manipulating the DOM programmatically.
PalmSource is only officially supporting XRD for the new tools. I'm personally a big fan of PilRC and one of its maintainers, but we aren't going to have PilRC integration into the build process in PODS 1.0.
The big thing to understand is that XRD is a direct XML-format representation of the Palm OS resources. This makes it very flexible, but there's no support for advanced operations like automatic sizing of controls, basing the position of controls on other items, or doing textual substitution of form text at resource-build time.
If you do play with XRD, be aware that the Palm OS Resource Editor doesn't work on the DOM, but instead works on a streaming model; it pulls in the XRD file and writes it back out from an internal representation. XML comments aren't preserved, but there are special comment tags in the XRD specification that will make it through processing.
-- Ben Combee, DTS technical lead, PalmSource, Inc. Read "Combee on Palm OS" at http://palmos.combee.net/
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