Glen Cordrey

What is a killer app for J2ME? Well, if I had a specific answer to that question I'd be slaving away over it during all my free time, dreaming of the riches and life of ease ahead of me. If you scan various MIDlet sites, you'll find a preponderance of games, numerous business applications, and a scattering of "other." The appeal and value of business applications has been widely discussed, so I won't rehash old ground. It's also easy to see the appeal of developing games, as the portability of handheld devices makes them an obvious target for entertainment applications. However, I've never heard of anyone making it big by developing J2ME games, so I'm afraid any J2ME developers counting on game royalties to pay the food and rent, let alone fund the purchase of that private island, may be in for a disappointment. What I haven't seen are any significant personal appli... (more)

Interesting Technologies

A recent J2ME-related announcement I find particularly interesting for a number of reasons is esmertec's demonstration of a MIDP 2.0 implementation on BREW. First, esmertec recently acquired Insignia, whose Jeode Embedded Virtual Machine for Java has made PersonalJava available on PDAs for some time. Is this acquisition the beginning of consolidation in the J2ME world, or an isolated incident? Second, this is the first deployment of a MIDP 2.0 implementation I've heard of. While MIDP 1.0 has been available on BREW via Insignia products for some time, the final MIDP 2.0 spec was ... (more)

The MIDlet Marketplace

Where can you go to make your MIDlets available to the public? Let's take a brief tour of some of the Web sites that offer MIDlets to the public and explore some of the factors you should consider. As with so much in life, one discriminator is money - are you providing your apps for free, or do you want to make money from them? Some sites, such as midlet.org, offer only free MIDlets, so if you want to make money you need to look elsewhere. Some sites provide a mix of free, shareware, and pay-per-download MIDlets, and some provide just the last. Another factor is which devices you... (more)

Hanged in a Fortnight?

Samuel Johnson said, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." While Sun's current situation may not be dire enough to be considered analogous to facing the hangman's rope, it is clear that economic distress is forcing Sun to change its mindset. Whether that change is a concentrating focus or a casting about for a lifeline is subject to debate. Now I won't speculate about the likelihood of Sun being acquired by IBM, HP, Dell, or anyone else, other than to say that Scott McNealy's egotism plus Sun's $5.7 billion cash reserve would... (more)

Setting Up a Java Shop: How To Build Better Software Faster

Three times in recent years I've joined an organization that was relatively new to Java development and missing some basic infrastructure elements that I'd relied on in previous development efforts. These elements include utility classes, standards and conventions, and build and quality control tools that help you produce a higher quality product with less risk. If you're involved in a development effort, whether it's new or ongoing, that's lacking any of these elements, you should consider incorporating them into your project infrastructure. Nuts and Bolts Some common utility s... (more)