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Symbian and J2ME and CF. oh my.

Robert says:

Brian Jepson points to a great link talking about how much development for the Compact .NET Framework rocks (compared to developing Java solutions for mobile platforms).

Having just started playing around the CF and especially the CF on the Smartphone 2003 platform, I'd have to say that this had better give a kick in the pants to the J2ME people. Having recently been looking at different mobile development technologies, the CF is much easier to get your app up and running in a small amount of time. I tried doing Symbian Dev C++ on my P800 and J2ME on the P800/Nokia 3650 only to be thwarted by frustration with the lack of well integrated tools. Setup's for each of the platforms were the worst ( with Symbian taking the cake here ) and the lack of some good integrated tools killed me. As an aside not I did NOT try the Codewarrior tools as I had a very small budget, hopefully someone can enlighten me. Leveraging my knowledge of Winform app dev, it was very easy to get acquainted with the CF. You'll just need to understand the limitations between the full Framework and the CF ( controls, certain class in the BCL are not availible ) and of course screen sizes. And of course we haven't even touched the power of using ASP.Net to deliver mobile web apps that target a specific device. All in all I'm getting more and more excited about the Mobile development arena. Using the CF has become my number one priority in my off time and I hope to release more apps that target this platform and specifically the SmartPhone devices. /me climbs off the soap box.
Published Aug 24 2003, 03:58 PM by jtucker
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Randy said:

Having worked in J2ME for the last 2 years, and CE over the last 7, I think the biggest problem with J2ME isn't so much the tools as it is the environment. VS.NET has been an absolute DREAM to work with, for both PC and PPC development - the fact that I was able to just install an SDK and add support for the SmartPhone is an incredible thing. For J2ME I worked with Forte/Sun ONE and getting it to work was just like any other Unix application (even though I was on an XP box): without folk lore and Google it never would have gotten it to run.

The biggest problem of J2ME, however, is that once the IDE is installed and running and you're coding, you THEN have to worry about the different devices you plan to support. EVERY phone maker has a different virtual machine (KVM); some companies (i.e. Motorola) have three or four different KVM's across their product line. EVERY KVM acts differently. You can tell your MIDLet that you want a soft button to be on the left and have a label that says "OK". Motorola's iDEN phone does that, but paints part of the screen behind the button and sometimes over the label. Motorola's T720 will sometimes put the button on the left. A Nokia Series 40 (i.e. 7210) will put the button on an Options menu; Series 60 (7650) will put it on a menu and will call the only other button available "Exit". Siemens will show the button on the left, but you can't figure out which button on the phone is the soft one because they have a strange keypad layout.

MS's SmartPhones won't have this problem, obviously, as they make the CF and they make the "KVM" equivilent. So long as the carriers don't lock the phone to new apps via IrDA or Bluetooth, it should be a dream to work with.

Sorry for hopping on the soap box - I didn't mean this to be THAT long but this mobile stuff has been in my blood for a long while now.
August 25, 2003 9:48 AM

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