This article will show how to establish a connection with the Palm synchronization process in order to upload the Palm Blog application data to various upload destinations.

If you recall in the first part, I indicated that we will have three main methods for uploading data, WebLogApi, Ftp, and Http. For simplicity sake, I will only cover the WebLogApi method in this article. You can easily adapt my solution to suit your needs for the other two methods, or even add your own methods to the project.

The synchronization process is fairly simple to understand. You have the Palm itself, which is connected to your PC or Laptop via a cable. On the computer you have the HotSync Manager running (it should be located in your system tray), and you have "Conduits", which are essentially plug-ins for the Manager which allow us to control the synchronization process for our specific application.

In part one, I explained the "Creator ID", a unique ID representing our application and databases. During the synchronization process the HotSync Manager needs to determine which conduit it needs to call in order to handle the incoming data. This decision is based on the Creator ID. Since we used the Creator ID of "PBlg" in our application, we know that whenever the HotSync Manager encounters that specific ID, it will attempt to call our conduit.

When creating any conduit we need to download and install the Conduit Developer Kit. This can be downloaded from the Palm Site (http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/conduits/). I have downloaded and will be using CDK 4.0.3 for Windows. Also download and install the Palm COM Installer Update. It ships a few bug fixes and such for COM Conduits, which we will be creating. You may want to take time to browse the documentation that ships with the CDK, there is a lot of very useful information available.

• download complete source code