Chapter 7. PIM: Accessing the Personal Information Manager
IN THIS CHAPTER
The traditional main purpose of PDAs is to serve as Personal Digital Assistants, providing access to a digital address book and calendar, as shown in Figure 7.1. The Personal Digital Assistant Profile (PDAP) contains a corresponding API, allowing you to access the device-specific address book, calendar database, and to-do lists from Java applications. This chapter discusses the Personal Information Manager (PIM) API that is available in PDAP.
Figure 7.1. The SONY CLIE Emulator showing the built-in address book containing two sample contacts.
For J2SE and PersonalJava the so called JavaPhone API is available (see http://java.sun.com/products/javaphone/). Because the PDAP implementation intends to have a very small footprint, which is necessary to fit in the small RAM of CLDC devices, adopting the JavaPhone API completely or just providing a JavaPhone subset would be inappropriate. In order to accomplish the request to minimize the PIM footprint, PDAP defines an optional PIM API in the package javax.microedition.pim.
In the following section, we will begin with the description of the general structure of the PIM API, and then go into the details of accessing the address book, calendar, and to-do lists. Finally, we'll show you how to create a demonstration MIDlet that is capable of accessing the address book of the device.