Friday, October 3, 2008

Beginning J2ME: Building MIDlets

MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) applications are piquantly called MIDlets, a continuation of the naming theme begun by applets and servlets. Writing MIDlets is relatively easy for a moderately experienced Java programmer. After all, the programming language is still Java. Furthermore, many of the fundamental APIs from java.lang and java.io are basically the same in the MIDP as they are in J2SE. Learning the new APIs (in the javax.microedition hierarchy) is not terribly difficult.

The actual development process, however, is a little more complicated for MIDlets than it is for J2SE applications. Beyond a basic compile-and-run cycle, MIDlets require some additional tweaking and packaging. The complete build cycle goes like this: edit, source code, compile, preverify, package, test or deploy.

To show how things work, and to give you a taste of MIDlet development, this article is dedicated to building and running a simple MIDlet. In this article, you'll get a feel for the big picture of MIDlet development.


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