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The Background
Give a lazy man the hardest job and
he'll find the easiest way of doing it. Now I'm not saying
I'm lazy of course, but when I first started looking into
developing applications on the Pocket PC platform there's
plenty there that makes you think there could be some long
nights ahead:
- Maintaining numerous processor specific
versions of code
- Worrying about component dependencies
- Getting to grips with the new development
environment
- Download and debugging on the device
(emulation is never quite the same)
That's just for starters, no doubt there
are plenty more items others might like to add to this list.
Of course this is all good character (and skill) building
stuff, but that might not be how my superiors view it while
waiting for a Pocket PC application release date. So, I
wanted to work in an efficient and familiar way, but target
this new platform…enter ASP. Here is a framework that
is used the world over to rapidly develop (web) applications,
often hooked up to databases and which supports the VBScript
language familiar to millions, not to mention the fact that
I've been developing in it for years. If it's good enough
for thousands of web applications, then it's good enough
for the Pocket PC!
Going through this thought process created
the long-term objective for PocketASP. The developer must
be able to create, view and debug ASP on their PC as normal
(Visual InterDev and IIS for example), only as a final stage
should they need to copy it down (unmodified) to the Pocket
PC to run final checks.
The Platform
Enough of where PocketASP came from,
what can it do in its current release? The evaluation version
contains a set of example ASP pages to demonstrate the key
supported features, such as:
- Obtain input from the user, using
the Form POST and GET processing
- Maintain session information, using
the Session object
- Manage inter-session information,
using persistent cookies
- Support the usual VBScript language
syntax and features such as include files, function calls,
sub routines etc.
- Database support, provided via familiar
ADO Connection and Recordset objects
The final point, database support, is
worth a little expansion as that provides the essential
connectivity when creating PC/Pocket PC integrated applications,
especially when coupled with the database merging functionality
provided by Active Sync 3.1. There are some restrictions,
as the underlying technology used on the Pocket PC is ADOCE,
but all the essentials are there for creating, reading,
updating and deleting database information.
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