slow on the uptake

Well, I've been fighting with talkLock, trying to figure out why my records get created in the RecordStore, but they are empty when I read them.

Then I remembered that the "Submit Form" command on the Setup page is what triggers writing the values to the Record Store. Aha.

So I fought with that for a while, trying to get the main program thread to wait for the Command Listener thread so that values are not read before they have a chance to get written by hitting the "Submit Form" command.

Finally I started reading about using threads to handle asynchronous things in MIDlets. It dawned on me that I am trying to do batch programming here. I started programming in the 80's when you had to do all of your event handling yourself.

Light bulb appears over my head.

In MIDlet land, event handling happens for free. But unless you do a lot of thread handling stuff, you are chained to using their event driven model. That is why all of the MIDlets that I have read code for have a basically empty main method. You let the Command Listener fire off events.

My problem was that I wanted to get things going without a Command event. I might look into that eventually, but for now, I am going to let the user kick things off by hitting the "Connect" command :)

Yay! I learnt something. It happens, but it sometimes takes a while. Maybe now I am prepared for an exciting career in javascript or gui programming of somekind.