I am quite new to Palm programming so maybe this isn't possible to do at all but I am looking into porting to the Palm platform a messaging service which we currently have developed for PocketPC and Symbian devices. When I read the API specifications and search in this newsgroup it seams that it is not possible to have an application that opens a TCP/IP connection to a server and maintain it even if the user selects another application on the palm device.
The application is recieving asyncronous messages from the server over the TCP connection and it must be able to be notified when there is data to read, process it and if anything requires the users attention it should become visible, if not it should just yield and let the application that were running continue without the user noticing anything. I've understood that the kernel is capable of multitasking but that only one thread is availible for applications due to license issues but is it possible to recieve and handle this kind of asyncronous events from the network? If possible it would be even better if the application could open a server socket to listen to incomming connections as well without having to be the active one but it is ok to open an outgoing tcp connection and recieve incomming events through it. If it is not possible to maintain a TCP connection and handle incomming events without the application has to be in focus, it unforturnatly renders PalmOS-based devices useless for most messaging services where you can have asyncronous events, you can't expect the user to have the messaging application active all time and not use the Palm for anything else which would be a pitty since there are quite a lot of interesting possibilities with the soon to come Handspring Treo and GPRS phones connected via bluetooth to the Palm. I hope it will be possible to find a solution to this issue as I would like to offer the PalmOS-based devices with GPRS wireless capabilities as an alternative to the PocketPC and Symbian devices. /Sverker -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
