Kris Thompson attended my BJUG kick start talk on J2ME development. I wanted to comment on his post.
1. I wouldn’t say that J2ME development has scarred me. But J2ME is definitely a technology (well, a set of technologies, really) that is still being defined. This leads to pain points and opportunities, just like any other new technology. Lots of ground to be broken.
2. Caching–you can do it, but just like in any other situation, caching in J2ME introduces additional complexities. Can it be worth it, if it saves the user time and effort? Yes. Is it worth it for the application I was working on? Not yet.
3. PNG–it’s easy to convert images from GIF/JPEG format to PNG. Check out the extremely obtuse JAI.create() method, and make sure you check out the archives of the jai-interest mailing list as well.
4. Re: Shared actions between MIDP and web portions of the application, I guess I wasn’t very clear on this–the prime reason that we don’t have shared action classes between these two portions was because, other than in one place (authentication) they don’t have any feature overlap. What you can do on the web is entirely separate from what you can do with the phone (though they can influence each other, to be sure).
Anyway, thanks Kris for the kind words.
As a last note, I would reiterate what Kris mentions: “Find out which phones have the features you want/need” and perhaps add “and make sure your service provider supports those features as well.” Unlike in the server side world, where everyone pretty much targets IE, J2ME clients really do have different capabilities and scouting those out is a fundamental part of J2ME development.
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