Introduction

You need to test and debug your Web clipping application (WCA) before sending it out to the world. As an alternative to burning batteries doing exhaustive testing on a real device, Palm, Inc. supports using the Palm OS Emulator (POSE). This is a program that emulates a real Palm OS device using a copy of the actual operating system code. You interact with POSE on your desktop, with mouse clicks taking the place of pen strokes and the keyboard acting as a quick substitute for graffiti entry of text.

Even with POSE testing, you will sometimes find applications acting very oddly. Your pages display as blanks, you get odd error messages with cryptic numbers, and your server shows too many hits. These are all artifacts of the Palm.Net proxy server, so understanding how it talks to the device and to your Web server can help you avoid problems like these.

In debugging, having a good set of tools is important. We close this chapter talking about software to help you find problems. Among the invaluable part of your toolkit are programs that will validate your Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), check your links, decompile your code, and send arbitrary requests to your Web server. Some of these run on the desktop, some run on the Palm OS device using them can really help you out.

Emulating Web Clipping by Using the Palm OS Emulator

The Palm OS Emulator (POSE) is a standalone software application that mimics the behavior of Palm...