This does indeed look like a great idea -- it has the additional advantage of
compressing the data before beaming it, which could lead to a significant reduction in
the demands on users' patience.
Anyone interested in this undertaking (my company is, but I don't know when and if
we'll get to it) should take a look at http://palmzlib.sourceforge.net/.
Of course, there are downsides -- most of them centering around memory demands, as
Jeff pointed out in his original message. It's my impression that ExgDBWrite makes a
local copy of a database before beaming it, further increasing the demands on free
RAM, on both sender's and receiver's devices.
A nice enhancement to this proposed mechanism would be an automatic launch of the
self-extracting .prc on recipient's machine. In principle, this is easy; just beam a
dummy message to it once it has been received and accepted. But I haven't figured out
a way to delay that message for an appropriate amount of time so that recipient's
machine is ready for it when it comes! Seems to me that Application Launcher should
have some way of automatically launching an application it has received via beaming.
Greg Lutz
NearSpace, Inc.
On 10 Sep 2000 at 16:25:00 -0700, Steve Sabram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Here's an idea. There has been talk of this but I haven't seen am implementation of
>this yet. One could write a compressor that
>would get multiple prc's and pdb's into one big self extracting prc. You would then
>only have one prc to beam over. Upon execution
>on the other Palm device, it would extract all the compressed databases and prc's you
>need in that format.
>
>In the Windows world, there are packages and self extracting ZIP files. Technically,
>an app like this is very possible on the
>Palm. Someone just needs to write it.
>
>Steve
>
>Jeff Ishaq wrote:
>
>> "Tom Zerucha" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:23651@palm-dev-forum...
>> >
>> > On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 04:28:54PM -0400, Jeff Ishaq wrote:
>> > > Other than using a self-exploding archive like those created with TRG
>> > > InstallPro, which would do the trick but require a prohibitive amount of
>> > > free space on the device for explosion, the only solution I could come
>> up
>> > > with was this:
>> >
>> > If the databases are read-only and under 64k, you can do a create
>> > database from image and simply store the pdb images as resources with
>> > the application prc. Also you can incorporate the data as resources
>> > in the PRC itself.
>>
>> These DBs are well over 64K, but thanks, that's a good idea anyway. :)
>>
>> -Jeff
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