I’ve been playing around with some J2ME development lately (thus my earlier posts on Sudokulet). The whole process has been pretty painless, thanks in large part to EclipseME.
EclipseME is a plugin for Eclipse to let you use Eclipse for J2ME development. And it fulfils my idea of a good design by changing very little about my Eclipse experience. I use Eclipse like I always do – its just I’m using a different set of APIs and the end result will run on a mobile phone. But all the normal Eclipse-y things like refactoring, etc work as normal.
As well as making J2ME “just work”, it also simplifies some of those tasks specific to J2ME. JAD files in particular (which are used to describe various aspects of your J2ME Midlet) are given a special editor so you don’t have to worry about the format of this file, or its various permitted keywords.
Also of great use is the new right menu option “Run on Emulator” (and “Debug on Emulator”). Its really handy to be able to do this from within Eclipse, rather than have to get out of the zone (and the IDE). That was one thing that used to drive me crazy in my old days when I used nothing but the Sun Wireless Toolkit to develop in.
(A note for new players – you still need the J2ME libraries which you can get from Sun, but also from various mobile vendors like Nokia, Sony, etc. The vendor SDKs also include special emulators that are more “true” to their particular phones. EclipseME supports a variety of these, and I’ve never found one that I couldn’t get to EclipseME to play with at all. However with at least one version of the Nokia SDK, I couldn’t get the “Run in Emulator” to work. It wasn’t a total loss though – I configured a “Run External Tool” setting to accomplish almost the same thing).
The development of EclipseME is nice and active, and it also integrates with other tools. ProGuard can be used in particular to obfuscate (and thus shrink) your J2ME midlet – which gets all the more important on limited storage mobile phones.
So, well worth checking out if J2ME is an area you want to get into. Its not the only option though – in particular I’m reading great things about NetBeans with the Mobility pack. As I understand it, this offers a slightly different model of graphically showing you the Midlet’s life cycle – giving you the option of more of a graphical based development process. I hope to get some time to play with it – expect a post soon! And Nokia are getting into Eclipse in a big way – an Eclipse-based tool for developing native C++ code is due out soon, and theres been talk of them contributing J2ME tools to the core Eclipse project.