Networking on Palm Devices

The CLDC defines a set of networking APIs called the Generic Connection Framework (GCF). This set of APIs defines the base networking APIs that a CLDC-based profile must support.

While the CLDC specification defines the networking APIs, the profile sitting on top of the CLDC defines the networking protocols available in a particular implementation. The MIDP, for example, uses the CLDC-defined Generic Connection Framework APIs and specifies that any implementation of MIDP must support the http protocol. The MIDP specification states in section 6.1 that "MIDP implementations must support for accessing HTTP 1.1 servers and services."

In this chapter, we will look at how we can connect to an HTTP server, explain how to use the APIs provided in the Generic Connection Framework, and give some working code examples.