LiveRecord is released under the
GNU General Public License.
A proof-of-concept of a Mobile Digital Social Network client, written in Mobile Java, LiveRecord asks a series of questions; the first is a selection of a media type (Film, TV, Book, Album, Game). It then asks for the name of the work, and asks you to rate it on a scale from one to five.
At this point the information is transmitted to a server-side PHP script (liverecord.php, included in the source pakage) using HTTP GET. This process can take many seconds (up to 60), while the phone establishes a connection to the Internet. Once the server has responded, the response is displayed; it should be an echo of the data submitted by the HTTP GET:
MediaType=MediaName+ratingIt will also report the total tranasaction time in millisecconds. A session should look like this:
And that's all it does. In a perfect world, there would be some massive and hugely sophisticated back-end MySQL database doing all sorts of wonderful things with this information, but right now, all the PHP script does is append the entry to a file, livelog.txt.
This MIDlet was developed on Mac OS X, using the MIDP 1.0.3 implementation from MPower, which you can get here. It's really great and I strongly recommend it.
WARNING: This code was a learning exercise for yours truly. It's not all that pretty, it's not all that well organized, and there are debugging statements scattered liberally throughout it. Plus, I didn't observe javadoc conventions. (Sue me.)
THIS CODE HAS NOT BEEN THOROUGHLY TESTED ON A WIDE RANGE OF MOBILES.
If your phone isn't one of these, I have no idea how it will run. LiveRecord conforms to the MIDP 1.0 specification for MobileJava, so theoretically it should run on all Java-capable mobile devices. (Strangely, this does not seem to be the case: All Mobile Java is equal but some Mobile Java is more equal than others.)
If you do run into problems, could you let me know? Send me an email with your handset make and model, and the kind of problems you've experienced.
BEFORE you send me a note saying you can't seem to get LiveRecord to work, please check to see if you have your Internet Settings for Java configured properly. (This was by no means trivial on my Vodafone AU-branded K700i.) Try accessing the Internet from some other applet, such as MidpSSH (highly recommended). If that works, and LiveRecord doesn't, you may have a problem worth reporting...
VERY IMPORTANT: It appears that many mobiles ship without appropriate Internet Settings for Java. This was certainly true for my Vodafone AU-branded phone, while an S700i being used on Telstra had no troubles connecting, and required little or no configuration. If LiveRecord launches, but fails when sending the data to the server (this is probably what has happened if you've finished putting your data in, but the mobile's screen says "Please wait..." forever and ever and ever) it's likely your mobile simply doesn't know how to let Java connect to the mobile data network for Internet data transfer. What can you do about it? Look on your carrier's website for information on how to configure your mobile for data access:
Configuring your mobile for data access may not be enough. You may also need to explicitly set your mobile's Internet Settings for Java. Consult the operating instructions which came with your mobile for details. And pray for a day when these things configure themselves. It can't be all that hard...