December 27, 2003

J2ME development advice

Here is some advice for any of you thinking about doing any development for J2ME. I've written before on J2ME considerations, but the project I'm working on is a bit further on now, and I thought I'd share some hard earned knowledge.

1. Get Windows.

Make sure you have access to a windows box, running a modern version of windows. While Sun's Wireless Tool Kit supports Linux and Solaris, and IBM's WebSphere Device Developer supports Linux, no other emulators do (nor do they work under wine).

Whether you want to support Motorola, Nokia, or NEC, you are pretty much need windows to run the emulator. And an emulator is crucial, because it allows you to rapidly develop an application. And testing on as many emulators as possible means that your application will be as tight as possible. However, when you get something that is close to finished, you'll need a real phone to test it on.

2. Get (a) real phone(s).

While emulators can tell you a lot, they certainly can't assure you that an application will run on a real phone. One project I worked on had an emulator that ran the app just fine, but the app was locking up on the real phone. It turned out that the networking code needed to run in a separate thread. There are many things that differ between an emulator and a real phone. Installation of a midlet is different (and differs between phones as well). Instead of accessing a file on disk, you have to use OTA provisioning (sure you can emulate that with the WTK, but that's just an emulation. I've run into issues with DNS that just don't show up on the emulator). Also, as mentioned above, the networking capability differs, and the connection is much slower. The amount of memory that you can use while developing on the desktop is effectively unlimited (some of the emulators let you monitor the amount used, but I don't know of any that lets you limit it), but phones have hard limits. Don't you want to know what happens when you try to use 101KB of memory on a device that only has 100KB? The limitations you face on user interface are also more real on a phone, when you can't use the keyboard to enter your username or the backspace key to fix errors. For all these reasons, you should get a phone as soon as you can.

3. Explore existing resources.

A couple of good books: Enterprise J2ME is a great survey book, with some very good ideas for building business applications (with large numbers of users) but not a whole lot of nuts and bolts. Wireless Java: Developing with J2ME, Second Edition is a good nuts and bolts book (it explains how to do your own Canvas manipulations, for example). Check out what else Amazon suggests for other ideas.

A couple of helpful urls: Fred Grott's weblog, MicroJava, the EnterpriseJ2ME site, Sun's site, of course, and the javaranch saloon is pretty helpful too.

The various carrier websites are useful, if only to find out what kind of phones you want to target: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Nextel. (Verizon in the USA is BREW only.)

4. Have fun.

Posted by moore at December 27, 2003 11:24 AM
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