Sprint Developers

One of the most common techniques used by MIDlets is scraping web pages. The situation arises when a MIDlet wants some piece of information from a website that was designed for humans, not computers. Common examples are retrieving stock quotes, weather forecasts, yellow pages, and news stories.

The following simple example demonstrates how a web page can be retrieved. You can add your own algorithms for scraping. In other words, process the data and extract just the information you want.

I'd like to test the GPS program written by Yakov Shafranovich, but I need some volunteers. If you have an A700 or a MM7400 and would like to help, please run this short test program for me and let me know if it works.

This article by Ben555 from HowardForums describes basic wireless technologies and protocols. All the common buzz words are here such as GSM, W-CDMA, UMTS, and EDGE.

I haven't had a wired phone line in my name since I can't remember when. The last time I had a wireline at home was when I was renting a room in a house with 4 others. Around that time, I started using my cell phone more and more. I stoped answering the house phone altogether because I didn't want to take messages for anybody else. I told all my friends to just call my mobile. Based on my experience, I wrote the following article for Howard Forums. I'm reposting it here for others who might be considering cutting the wire. I also think there are some ideas in here that developers should consider.

I've been wireless since 1999. Ordering pizza has been a problem but Dominos lets me order on-line now w/o a phone.

I have a SprintPCS Treo 600 that I synchronize with a PC at home. Rather than plugging it into a USB cable, I setup my Treo, PC, and router to remotely sync my data over the Vision network. It's kind of slow, but very handy.

To be fair, I must admit that I lifted most this information from other websites, but here's the step by step guide. This should work for any Palm phone such as the i330 or i500.

RSS and WAP are two very powerful, yet underused technologies. And they become even more so when combined.

The "Hello World" program is usually the first program you learn to write. It demonstrates basic syntax, output, and shows the steps necessary to create a running program. In the classic "Hello World" spirit, I tried to come up with the shortest J2ME MIDlet I could think of for this article.

A General Content Descriptor (GCD) file is similar to a JAD file. While a JAD describes a J2ME MIDlet for download, a GCD describes downloads like ringtones and pictures. GCD's are plain text files and you can create them using any simple text editor like Windows Notepad. If you'd like your phone to download your own picture, then you'll need a GCD file.

You can create a mobile version of your website that is compatible with most cell phones including Sprint's Vision handsets and Wireless Web browsers. Whether you need to find a hosting service or you can't figure out WML syntax, this guide will get you started. Soon you'll be provisioning your own ringtones and MIDlets.

Thanks to Sprint's extensions to the typical URI schemes, you can create links on your website that launch MIDlets installed on visitors phones. Everybody knows about "http:" and you've probably seen "ftp:" and "mailto:" as well. You'll find that Sprint handsets support the "midlet:" scheme which can not only launch a MIDlet, but can also be used as a mechanism to pass data from a website to an application.

The following is a list of the common URI schemes. You've probably seen most of these.

• http, https
• telnet, tn3270, rlogin
• gopher