Day: 21 February 2010

J2ME's support for calling a server is rather simple and low level. Not only do you have to deal with the HTTP Connection at a low level, there is no high level support for cookies, authentication or remote procedure calling. So if you want to pass an object to the server and get a response, you need to figure out how to do that. XML over HTTP is one solution, but presents its own problems like the serialisation and deserialisation of objects, not to mention higher network traffic because of the meta-data held within the XML. JAX Binding is certainly not supported in J2ME-land which results in you having to use a SAX parser. In previous projects I have toyed with a simple way of providing services over JSPs, which take and receive delimited text. The idea is to implement your own simple serialization and deserialisation of simple objects allowing you to make simple calls to the server and receive simple responses. I purposefully used the word "simple" four times in that last sentence to impress upon you the idea that server calls should be kept simple. Take for example a J2ME application which tracks a GPS location. To send the location of the user it can simply send a line of text like this: 006.574438|045.453345|11022344843373 What's it mean? longitude | latitude | timestamp The serialising and deserialising of the data is VERY simple using a StringTokenizer (erm, which doesn't exist in J2ME, so see later!). And the server could…

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