Thank you Brian, sounds fairly reasonable. If Palm would really change the
structure, I do believe they would also provide an interface:
Still one can e.g. run a 16bit WinApp on a Win2000 or WinME, and I should
think,
that palm will provide a similar flexibility to its own platforms: On a market,
which is
expanding an evolving so rapidly, I personally would not like to restrict my
apps to a max version number as far as possible.
If one would be provided with an interface, which preserves downward
compatibility,
one can test one's apps on each new OS Version and react at once to a change.
I am actually confident.
Brian Pearson schrieb:
> > The AddressDB structure is Open Source, so anyone knows about it and
> > can access the AddressDB from his own application. That's fine, as long
> > as the Address App programmers do not change their data structures.
> >
> > Do the Address App programmers provide an API-Interface to the
> > AddressDB, which guarantees consistency across all Address App versions?
> >
>
> As far I know, there is no API provided - you're on your own.
>
> > Or is there no such real problem at all (only a programmer's
> > nightmarebooboomonster)?
> >
>
> Probably your best bet is to write your own API that isolates your app from
> the internals as much as possible. At least this way you'll have less code
> to rewrite.
>
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong:
>
> btw - does anyone know if Palm has ever, or ever plans to change the
> structure of the built-in DBs? Seems to me that this would cause problems
> when an old record interacts with new code - maybe Palm would have to
> version the records themselves and maintain code for handling both old and
> new records. If that sounds confusing, consider what would happen if you
> were to beam an "oldstyle" record to a newer version of one of the Built-in
> apps - the record would be in the old format. And beaming "newstyle"
> records to an old version of the software seems even more troublesome.
> Anyway, because of these problems, it seems to me the Palm never intends on
> changing the underlying format of the records.
>
> Does that sound right?
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> Brian Pearson.
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