The sudden afternoon.

[hirez]

Today I consumed exactly the right amount coffee. The bit I thought would be hard turned out to be a swearing match, and the hand-wave will probably turn around and bite me in the arse.

In short, I have a lash-up that will post to my local unix box via the magic of about five lines of Java that assemble enough parameters to be sensible and parcel the entirety off to the kXML-RPC library, which Just Works.

However... While the Series-60 emulator builds URLs along the lines of www.site.com/xmrpc/endpoint.cgi, the Series-40 code inserts a not-strictly-neccessary ':80' ... Which appears to confuse the shit out of the webswerver at the otherwise estimable Gradwell Organisation.

Much of this discovery and swearing and incredulous pointing at Ethereal entrails was aided and abetted by the splendid jarkman who appeared to have little better to do than watch me acting like an overexcited teenager.

I think I'll call that a Good Day.

There's a state that you can get into where you just know how something's going to work or what's wrong with it. For those of us not unfamiliar with the process of second-guessing, it's a liberating feeling. I'm close. I can smell it.

Comments

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Can I have a copy of the source?

(Shame LJ doesn't have a Current Book: parameter. Current Book: J2ME In A Nutshell)

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

It might be worth trying the same code on the Real Phone, too. Bet the simulator is inexact, and running on the wrong firmware version.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes, when it's fit to be seen and doesn't have any hardcoded nastiness left.

[FX: Amazon]

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

By the way - Kablog with the Sun MIDP crashes like a dog on the Treo 600. Don't know if I should blame Sun or Kablog. Will have to try the IBM one.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Ha. Websphere's converter tool for making PRCs won't talk to Kablog's JAR/JAD files.

Java. A nasty mess of ill-made command line tools and strange compatibility problems. They could take over the world, if they could only get their act together. Pah.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Marvellous, innit? Can't find a picmoblog tool when you look for one, so announce to the world you'll write yer own... And then three turn up at once.

Bastards.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. There's too many versions.

There needs to be J2FW (or at least J1.4FW) : Java Fucking Working Edition. Cross-platform functionality is enforced by large geezers with pickaxe handles.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Yes. All tools run when clicked on, nobody needs to edit their path to make anything work, and error messages are not extracts from The Trial.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Yours will be better.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

No, there needs to be a JxME Hardware Standard, whereby you could look at the specs on the side of the box of the phone you were just about to purchase, and be satisfied that it conformed to a set of standards. It strikes me that 99% of the problem with J2ME is that phone manufacturers just randomly add new features to their Java implementations and hardware without bothering to inform anyone that they might care to support it.

J2ME is still at the stage of web browsers circa v3 and before; manufacturers randomly adding <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags to their repertiore in the insane delusion that adding extra features which nobody else supports gives their device market place leverage. It doesn't, it just means that there will be less support for their devices because the programmers will get pissed off having to write a special version of their otherwise fully compatible software just to satisfy the six people who actually own the nonstandard device.

Having supposedly J2ME compatible phones with completely random screen resolutions, keypad assignments and inner filepaths is insane.

For starters, there should be a set of finite screen resolutions, each higher one backwardly compatible with the rest. That way I wouldn't have spent two days trying to solve level twenty-something on Sakoban only to discover that there was an extra area of the map hidden off the screen, visible only to people whose phone had a larger display.

And MID-P isn't it.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Yes.

But I don't think it'll happen for a good long time, because the other marketing priorities for the phone seem to trump any compatibility arguments. Phone people just don't have an 'open platform' sort of a head.