Vikram Goyal's blog has some pretty good comments about dark side of J2ME. Check it out.

More of J2ME

Now that I have few weeks of experience from J2Me development few API's starts to piss me off. Not that they are completely broken or anything but some small scale problems.

First of all, I'm still upset by the fact that there isn't any guide that how application architecture should be implemented. In mobile world this lack of documentation is not surprising but usually Sun has produced quite good documentation.

Well, I've implemented the application so, that I derive from ui components, for example Form. These derived widgets handle how data is shown in screen. But if I want to register to hear what user does to single ui component, for example if user changes value of some item, it can't be done that way. Form object cannot register it self to listen these events. I wonder what was going on in designers mind when this was designed. But then of course, I might be on wrong track how ui should me arranged.

After the realization that Form cannot know what it's members are doing, I decided to implement inner private class to listen these events and forward them to form class. This doesn't work either, but fault is on Nokia's handset. Application works just fine in emulator but refuses to open the form in target hw. No errors or anything, it just doesn't work. And no, I'm not using obfuscator.

But don't get me wrong. Working with Java after few months of other platforms, it is so good to be back. At least major part of api's are making sense and intuitive to use.

J2ME application architecture

Nowadays I'm involved in project where we develop software using J2ME. Profile is MIDP 2.0. First task was to design proof of concept if not to anyone else to me. To proof that I can develop usable, sane software with this to me new platform.

Tutorials and such, found on web concern mostly describe historical aspects of J2ME and usage of basic highlevel ui components. Usually there are also descriptions of lowlevel ui api. But all of these guides that I found were too small scale applications that had none of the real world applications problems.

First major problem was architecture of basic software. Quite soon it was clear that other folks had same problem too. Well, I couldn't find any reference design or documents from sun. Ibm developerworks has got some guidelines and I ended up using same solution.

Now that I've done application with three different screens, I don't like this model. It has too much code in controller class, too much of screen specific code is in controller. If I would like to observe one of the form items, it is nearly impossible to do so.

So if you have any proposals, please inform me about them too.

Problems on start

Somehow blogger won't show anything when accessing blog's main page. I can see only 'Not Found' error. Well I hope this will fix it.

Second problem is that blogger won't give me option to write subject to post. This is weird.

UPDATE: problem solved.