Re: [pilot-db-list] editing on a PC

[Yedidyah Bar-D. <di...@ta...>]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 02:06:33PM -0600, Nathan Kurz wrote:
> > > > Should it? Is this a good way, considering no tool will follow closely
> > > > enough the development of pilot-db? And, BTW, isn't something written in
> > > > some higher-level language easier to write? E.g. things like
> > > > datascript or DataWorkshop? I know this isn't pilot-db-related, but
> > > > palm-db-tools seems dead to me.

I searched some more and found a few other relevant tools. Some of them:

<http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/pilot/pdb/>
"This program converts PDB files to a human-readable, human-editable, ASCII form, and back again. In fact, the ASCII form is designed to be more than just editable by humans; it's also easily editable by programs, provided the programs are written in a little language called Lua. The converter translates between PDB files and Lua data values."
They already have modules for jfile and mobiledb. jfile is 400 lines,
mobiledb is 210. Quite dense (compared to 790 lines for JFile3.{h,cpp}
and 764 for MobileDB.{h,cpp} in palm-db-tools).
Last release was in 2000.

<http://obermuhlner.com/public/Projects/Palm/PDBC/>
"    ``pdbc'' is a compiler than converts a source file into a Palm DataBase
    (PDB) file or Palm Resource (PRC) file. The language the ``pdbc''
    compiler understands is designed to be easy to understand und write. It
    is powerful enough to give the freedom to describe the binary content of
    the database records in a variety of ways.

    It should also be easy to generate the ``pdbc'' source file from another
    language (e.g. Perl).

    In addition to the ``pdbc'' tool there is also 'pdbdec'. pdbdec is a
    decompiler which converts any valid PDB or PRC file into a ``pdbc''
    source file. This is useful to check the correctness of the ``pdbc''
    generated file and to analyze other PDB files."
It is not easy to add specific support for pilot-db to it, but it still
seems useful. In the man page he says he has some idea for templates,
which sounds just like what I thought about, but only an idea.
Latest release from 2002.

The terms I used in google for the searches: 'pdb binary convert',
'pdb binary editor', 'pdb structure convert'. I can't be sure I did not
miss some killerapp that does everything, but it sure didn't use the
right words :-)

What do you think?
-- 
Didi