How Server-Side Applications Differ from Web Clipping

Server applications that used Clipper for display used HTML or plain text as their output format. Using HTML was the easiest way to display the data on a Palm OS device. However, unlike Clipper, your native applications are more interested in the real data rather than its presentation. Displays are now managed by your own code using the native Palm OS user interface. If we use our custom application to access the Web pages developed in Chapters 5 through 8, we will find that we will need to parse HTML data, and then extract the data from it. This is a very tedious and unreliable method. Because we control both sides of the application, it makes sense to provide raw data to the client.

Data can be sent to a client in any format negotiated by both client and server. The easiest solution is to send a serialized form of server-side data structure to the client. For example, the server application may send the order information as a comma-separated stream of items. A more elegant solution is to use a...