Phone.com simulator
The simulator is by far one of the most useful things I've found to help me do HDML development. The simulator will enable you to see how your applications will look on a variety of phones. You can actually download skins from the site to see how your application will look on different phones and different screen sizes. You also sometimes encounter problems on the simulator that you might not see on your phone, so it serves as a great testing tool. You can see what the simulator looks like in Figure B.

FIGURE B


The simulator is great for testing and lets you choose what phone skin to use. Roll over picture for a larger image.

One of the greatest ways to use the simulator is to view the code that your HDML phone browser receives. As you may have guessed, you can't do this on the phone, so it's nice to be able to use the simulator to go to a cool wireless page and view the source for that page in order to give you ideas for your own applications (i.e., snagable code). To view the source in the simulator, just go to Info->Source on the menu.

Phone.com developer forum
I've used the Phone.com developer forum to help me solve some of the problems I've faced. It definitely helps to know that you're not alone in terms of the issues you're dealing with. Just as you might go to Notes.net when you're looking for a solution to a Notes or Domino problem, you can go to the Phone.com developer forum to help you resolve HDML and WML-related problems.

Webmonkey tutorial on HDML
Here's one more great source of information. The "Intro to HDML" article on Webmonkey's site helped me get up to speed quickly on HDML development and relieved a lot of the fear of developing in a new language. Webmonkey articles and tutorials are sublimely cool and fun to read, so I enthusiastically recommend reading this article and browsing their site for other useful information as well. You can find the HDML article at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/48/index3a.html.

A wireless Web page on a Domino server in three simple steps
OK, I'm going to give a very short tutorial here on how to make your very first wireless Web page using HDML and how to place it on your Domino server. This isn't meant as a full tutorial, rather it should serve to whet your appetite, to give you a point from which to explore. I'll definitely write more articles on wireless Domino development in the future, so consider this a very basic introduction.

Step 1
The first thing you'll need to do is set up your Domino server so it can recognize and properly deal with HDML files. To do this, you'll need to add an entry to the "httpd.cnf" file on the server, which you can edit with a text editor. The best way to find the file is to do a search for it. Here's the line that you'll need to add after the rest of the entries for text types:

Step 2
Put a sample HDML file on the server. You can either place it there manually or create a LotusScript agent to write it and put it there for you. Name the file "sample.hdml" and place it in the domino/html directory on the server. Here's the code the file should contain: