In the not terribly distant future, I’m likely to be called on to develop an application for the Palm Pilot (actually a Symbol handheld, which incorporates a bar code scanner) to track the locations of various items. Ideally, I’d have the user select a location (Outer Mongolian Warehouse, Pandemonium Home Office, Room 101, etc.), then scan a batch of items identified by individual bar codes, recording a list of items at that location at that time. After scanning, the Palm should synch with a master database on a server, allowing us to keep a history of movement of physical items.
I can, without thinking too hard about it, come up with at least three or four ways of doing this in a pure Notes environment. However, I’m not sure what limitations I’m under when I go to the Palm Pilot. We’re likely to use Pylon Pro at the conduit for getting information from point A to point B, but the documentation I’ve read is none to clear on just how databases and, more importantly from my point of view, program code acts on the Palm. Can somebody who has worked with these things give me some idea of what kind of limitations I’ll face? Can I use @Functions? LotusScript? No code at all? Is there a better product to use than Pylon?
Edit: I left something important out. The reason I’m talking about Notes is that this is additional functionality for an existing inventory database in Notes, which contains master documents containing fuller information about the items in question. The Palm Pilot part is pure data entry, but does need to talk to the master database at some point.