MIDP ruined me…
… or at least my day. But let’s start at the beginning of this sad little story:
About a month ago i started working on a small rss-reader midlet. I used suns j2me wtk 1.0.4 because i thought that would guarantee that it runs on the largest possible number of target devices and honestly believed it would work on my (then beloved) nokia 7650. The development of the first full-featured version that met my expectations took about one week (i should note that this was my first attempt in writing a j2me midlet, a skilled j2me developer should be able to finish something like that in a day or two). It loaded rss feeds from the net, parsed them using kxml (a tad slow, but it worked), displayed them properly, even stripped the html from descriptions to make them better readible (the lack of this feature makes friday, another rss-reader midlet, imho almost unusable), even offered simple bookmark support based on a j2me rms. Of course it lacked proper error handling, commentary, testing and documentation, but at least it worked correctly and did its job when i tried it in the wtk emulators.
Then came the day i activated gprs on my nokia 7650 and tried my midlet on a real phone - and of course it didn’t work. It installed and started fine, the menus looked right, the bookmark management worked correctly, but it didn’t load the feed. I didn’t have the time to further investigate the problem back then, but today i took the time and tried to get some help @forum nokia. First i stumbled across a thread that mentions that you have to open the httpconnection in a separate thread to make it work on a 7650. I didn’t do that in my original midlet (and yes, i know it’s REALLY bad programming style and that you should ALWAYS open your httpconnection in a new thread). Fixing that took me about half an hour, but again, the midlet didn’t work.
Next i found a thread where a nokia official explained that there’s a bug with httpconnection with several language versions, so i tried switching my phone language from german to english, again without success. So i continued my journey into the archives of forum nokia and found a thread where someone claims that httpconnection doesn’t work on firmware version 3.16. Of course my phone runs on 3.16, so i’ll have to get a firmware upgrade soon, though i don’t have time for that and i’m really scared of having to give up my phone for a week or even longer just for this damn upgrade. Stuff like that really pisses me off. Currently i’m trying to focus on breakfast @tiffany’s (the movie) to free my head from all this j2me crap, but even that won’t work. Feel free to contact me if you think you can help me with my problem.