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by johansch 4286 days ago
Sun and later Oracle were kind of crap at leading J2ME into the future, so basically nothing worthwhile happened after MIDP 2 in 2002 (besides vendor-specific API:s from like Nokia and Sony Ericsson). So yeah, you had to build your own UI, pixel by pixel. To me, that was the charming aspect of the platform, like with the Amiga, or with DOS stuff. :)
2 comments
pjmlp 4286 days ago
Only if you are looking into mobile handsets.

J2ME is used a lot in embedded systems for factory control, automotive systems, network aware measure equipment, copiers, ...

Edit: forgot to mention that in the mobile area it is actually sad, specially with Oracle pushing ADF Mobile instead. So back to C++ for multi-platform code.

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joverholt 4286 days ago
Oh yeah, it was fun building our own UI that we had complete control over, so that part wasn't so bad. It was just at times, it seemed like they (carriers) didn't want you using the phone for something other than voice. What!? you want to actually send your own data, over our network? And tag it with GPS?
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johansch 4286 days ago
Which app(s) did you work on? Surely it's okay disclose this nearly a decade later? :)
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joverholt 4286 days ago
I made two apps, and sadly, not many people have heard of them, since I was working for a small company at the time and we really didn't have the clout to deal with carriers or a sales force to sell. Both apps were agricultural related.

The first app was a general purpose data collection app. It was purely data driven. I could define a template on our server which defined what fields you wanted information for, the type of field (text, number, list selection, etc) and if it was geo enabled. This would be sent out to the phone, and a user could enter the information, send it up to our server and view it on a map. Doesn't sound to exciting, but you could pretty much create a template for anything, This was before google maps, so we also had to manage the shapefiles and handle displaying and rendering them on our website.

The other app was a payroll app for harvesting crews. We could set up the crew members on the server, they would get downloaded to the phone where we used a bluetooth card reader to scan them in/out. Also added some bluetooth printing.

Overall, you could be productive using J2ME. It was just all the stuff that went with getting it out to users.

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