PDA Technology in the Retail Industry

From thecentric

This was my 4th year university project where I created a PalmOS based handheld solution for the retail industry. The abstract follows:

The handheld hardware currently being used in the retail industry are proprietary devices built for specific use in the retail industry and cost many thousands of Euro. The PDA solution that I developed can replace the old proprietary hardware with a PalmOS device which is cheaper and more widely supported.

The device I used included a barcode scanner and an 802.11b wireless network card. The development languages that I used were PalmOS C, Java and SuperWaba. SuperWaba is a highly rated java virtual machine for use on handheld devices; I used it primarily to make development as quick as possible. Some programming was carried out in C as some access to the native PalmOS API was required.

During this project, I was accessing information which was stored in ISAM databases. One of the only ways to access ISAM databases is to use a C-API provided by IBM called CISAM. As part of this project I wrote a shared library that wraps many CISAM functions, and made this library available to JAVA through JNI.

Here’s a 2000 word paper that I submitted to The Institute of Engineers Of Ireland, for the Siemens Young Engineer of the Year Award. Here’s a paper I wrote with Dr. John Breslin that got published relating to this project.