An innovative integrated development environment for the Pocket PC PDA

Abstract

Current Integrated Development Environments running on Personal Digital Assistants lack features that address the challenges in human-computer interaction with the PDA. The slow input techniques and small screen display of PDAs contribute to the overall difficulty of software development on the PDA. These problems discourage developers from using the PDA as a programming platform. An innovative IDE for the Pocket PC PDA is designed to facilitate fast prototyping and ease of development. The graphical user interface of the IDE overcomes the slow input techniques and small screen display of the PDA. To take advantage of the capabilities of PDA, a novel design which integrates PDA personal information management capabilities with the IDE is explored. The programming language for the IDE is Ruby, a powerful general-purpose object-oriented scripting language. The PocketRuby IDE is a powerful and efficient programming development environment on the PDA.