It's all about J2ME/Mobile. Is the promise true?

by Dion Almaer

JavaOne really did push the Mobile side of things. My fellow brit from Vodafone made it seem like all Java developers should rush out and start programming games for J2ME. If we do that we make "ONE MILLION DOLLARS!"

I definately understand that they want to push this market. And I certainly know how nutty people are about their mobiles. I can't tell you how many times I have seen a group of friends walking down the street together, yet they were all on the phone / texting. It actually started to drive me a bit nuts to be honest :)

If you haven't looked at J2ME, you will probably assume that MIDP 1.0 allows you to do so much stuff, and that SO many apps are using it. I am not too sure if this is true.

MOST apps that I have seen are not written to MIDP, as you just can't do too much with it. A friend works for a company that has to support RIM, Palm, and PocketPC. The client UI is written from scratch. They just had to drop down to the proprietary APIs to get their stuff done.

I think that MIDP 2.0 is much needed, and it will still be some time before you can write an app that just runs on any device in a decent fashion.