Development IDEs for J2ME

gregorypierce · October 26, 2002, 3:46pm

I’ve been reviewing IDEs that are out there to determine which IDE is actually worth its salt and I must say that I’m mostly disappointed in all of them. JBuilder is to expensive in that it requires a real copy of JBuilder just to build Midlets (which is a seperate download BTW), Code Warrior is nice if you like being nickle and dimed for a wireless, palm, embedded, etc version of the exact same tool, IntelliJ (my normal favorite) doesn’t have any native support for J2ME - you can code in it by specifying the bootclasspath for J2ME classes but that’s as far as it goes, which leaves the only development environment that seems competent SunOne.

While normally I both loathe and despise the SunOne studio of bloat and suffering, if all you need to do are Midlets - the Sun One Studio 4 (update 1) Mobile Edition is the best thing out there… mostly because it does everythign that all the others do, and it doesn’t cost you a dime. All of the emulators out there plug into it cleanly, and it will package up your application for distribution. So at the moment, I think its a winner.

I doesn’t have a Midlet “GUI builder”, but if you have seen the what Midlet GUIs are capable of - you know that you shouldn’t pay a dime for that functionality.

Anyone out there disagree?

princec · October 26, 2002, 9:53pm

I use Eclipse.
No GUI builder, but I get by without it.

Cas

gregorypierce · October 27, 2002, 2:14am

Does the latest release for eclipse actually understand the creation of MIDP packages? I didn’t look at it seriously because I knew that Sun One Mobile Edition understands the process, the emulators, profiling and debugging J2ME applications.

princec · October 27, 2002, 9:22am

Actually, I don’t think it does, now you mention it. I was just making .jars out of it for testing purposes but never got round to actually making a J2ME package for deployment.

Cas

artkim · October 30, 2002, 10:55am

Using ultraedit in nice conjunction with Ant to do the building , obuscation and packaging works very nicely. All the emulators can be run via command line, and also using the ktoolbar so it is very efficient.

I always feel alot free working in a simple, non-targeted IDE.

For midlets i dont think GUI builders are big time savers anyways.

pepe · October 31, 2002, 6:25am

Forte (SunOne) also has emulators and a bunch of j2me tools. Still not tried them by now, so i can’t give an advice about their quality.

gdada · March 13, 2003, 1:54pm

Take a look at Codewarrior Wireless Studio. You can get it for free if you join www.motocoders.com - which is also free, and it supports virtually all J2ME emulators:

-Sprint
-Nokia
-Motorola
-iDEN
-Siemens
-Sony Ericsson
-Personal Java (PJEE)

on-device debugging (if device allows)

It includes J2ME features including

Automatic JAD and JAR generation
Obfuscation
LCDUI RAD tools
automatic compile, preverify, obfuscate, package, and luaunch on an emulator at a signle click

Plus, it is a native applciation (unlike Sun One or JBuilder) so it is fast! three seconds to startup.

Now that you can get it for free, I wonder why would you use anything else (unless you really like command line or love your current IDE)

gregorypierce · March 16, 2003, 1:17pm

Codewarrior RAD and a couple of other features don’t work with JDK1.4, which shocked the hell outta me It also is still living in the J2ME 1.0.4 past >:(

aardbei · March 19, 2003, 3:12am

[quote]Using ultraedit in nice conjunction with Ant to do the building , obuscation and packaging works very nicely. All the emulators can be run via command line, and also using the ktoolbar so it is very efficient.

I always feel alot free working in a simple, non-targeted IDE.
[/quote]
then u should also consider http://www.crimsoneditor.com it is a freeware editor that really looks like UE

shareme · April 14, 2003, 11:14am

Even though I have tried SunOne Studio, CWS, and Eclipse; I end up always using Eclipse

Eclipse doesn;t understand midlet originally out of box…but you can create a template to represent a starting midlet file and by using the anttena ant set of tasks(get at Sourceforge.net) you can have a pretty good dev environment for J2ME and PJ…

The only challenge I run into is that only about 65% of emulators are designed to be plugable into SUN’s WTK emulator framework and thus I ned up using about 3 different sets of emulator groups within my custom antenna ant tasks to test midlet son specific phone emulators…

You will like the speed of eclipse even with only 256 meg of ram it flies compered to SunOne Studio…

It does take time to get use to the layout just like if you were learning any other new IDE…so take soem time to play and explore if you do decide to take the Eclipse plunge…

Note, there is a commercial version of Eclipse fo wrieless that IBM sells for about the same price as CWS…$600 I think which includes soem more stuff but I am doing so well without I don’t think its a good use of money as of yet…

gdada · April 14, 2003, 11:35am

CodeWarrior is free for a limited time for everyone who joins the www.motocoder. developer program.

plus, the ‘PDA edition’ of CodeWarrior fixes the JDK 1.4 issue.
-GD

Binary_Chester · April 17, 2003, 6:40pm

I use JBuilder 8 with MobileSet and Siemens SMTK and it works fine but i want to change to Eclipse and have done some MIDlets with Eclispe. But i can’t figure out how to connect Eclipse’ debugger to the emulator.
If i start the emulator in debug-mode it seems to wait for a connection, if i try to connect Eclipse’ debugger remote to the emulator, it quits immediatly and Eclipse says “kvm terminated”. With JBuilder everything works fine.

Has someone out there a solution for me?

ciao, Chess

(sorry for my bad english)