I've been quiet for a few weeks; the main reason for this is the posting I'm making today. I'm pleased to announce that Palm OS Developer Suite 1.0 has been released. We've already had alpha and beta releases posted to our web site, but this is the first production version.
This has been a very big project within PalmSource, and I'm happy to be on the team that produced it. We aren't stopping work now, either. We're in the middle of a bunch of work for upcoming versions of the tools, including updating our plugins and tool integration to be based on Eclipse 3.0 and CDT 2.0 and fixing a lot of the issues noted in the README files that come with PODS. We will be talking more about the next release in September at the PalmSource Euro DevCon.
The primary target for this release of PODS is development for Palm OS Cobalt. This is the new operating system from PalmSource that was released to our licensees earlier this year. PODS is the first released toolset to support this new operating system, and we expect it to be the primary tool used for Palm OS Cobalt development.
There already are good toolsets on the market for Palm OS 68K API development, and while PODS is a nice front-end to PRC-Tools, there's not much reason to move your development to it if you're comfortable and productive with CodeWarrior for Palm OS. If you are doing extensive work with PACE Native Objects, you probably should stick with CW; while PODS does support PNO development using the Palm OS Protein C/C++ Compiler, we don't have the extensive loader or API calling support that the CodeWarrior tool.
PODS is an aggregation of a lot of different toolsets, some produced by PalmSource and some provided by open-source development projects:
- The IDE for the toolset is Eclipse 2.1, an open-source tool developed by IBM and the Eclipse development community. This IDE has primarily been focused on Java development, and it is written in Java using a special library called SWT that exposes the native windowing system as a Java class library.
- To provide support for C and C++ development, a set of plugins called CDT (C/C++ Developer Tools) was developed by a team from IBM and QNX. CDT has a very Unix flavor to it, supporting a makefile-based build system.
- For building Palm OS 68K API programs, we use PRC-Tools, a collection of GNU tools customized for Palm OS 68K development
- For building Palm OS Protein API programs and PACE Native Objects, we use the Palm OS Protein C/C++ Compiler suite, an internal PalmSource project to produce an ARM EABI-compliant C/C++ compiler and associated tools.
- Resource editing and compilation is performed by the Palm OS Resource Tools, which includes the Palm OS Resource Editor and the PalmRC resource compiler.
- Debugging support is provided by the Palm OS Debugger, supplied both in a standalone GUI application and as a plugin to the Eclipse environment.
- The Palm OS 68K SDK and the Palm OS Protein SDK are included, containing header files, libraries, documentation, sample code, and simulators for Palm OS Garnet 5.4 and Palm OS Cobalt 6.01.
- The Palm OS Emulator is also provided, along with a Palm OS 4.1.2 ROM image. POSE is a very useful debugging tool, as it emulates real 68K-based hardware and provides lots of memory diagnostics.
Now, this is a 1.0 release. There are a lot of Eclipse-related issues that we have deferred until after we've completed our update to Eclipse 3.0 and CDT 2.0. We also know that there are issues with our own tools, and we've been doing a lot of work to collect all of those issues and prioritize them. You can help by providing clear and specific feedback, either to the bug reporting form on the PalmSource site or to the tools-forum@news.palmos.com mailing list.