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Since I've worked pretty hard on it, I'll take a moment or two to promote my own 'platform': Hecl, at http://www.hecl.org./ It's a scripting language built on top of J2ME, which means that no, you probably shouldn't write games with it, but on the other hand, it should make it far easier for the 'average Joe' to actually be able to successfully create an application, and for a good developer to do things much faster than with J2ME.

Also, for fun, I created a prediction market about which platform will dominate, but since it's not played with real money, it's not worth all that much:

http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/6481

... if only someone would throw some money my way to work on Hecl (http://www.hecl.org/) :-)

Hecl: http://www.hecl.org/

it is perhaps less general-purpose than the poster might want, but I have different design considerations in mind:

Small, flexible, very dynamic, and concise - in other words, I want it to be a complement to Java, rather than simply a scriptable Java, ala Beanshell. This means that perhaps you wouldn't want to write the entire app in Hecl, but on the other hand, as a language to write quick extensions with, perhaps it's a bit faster/easier to work with.

The most interesting feature at this point is that Hecl is small enough to run on Java-enabled cell phones, even pretty basic ones like my Nokia 3100, which only accepts Java stuff - no symbian. This means that you can code apps with no recompiling, and also make them very dynamic (you could make an app that downloads code, stores it and runs it as needs be).

Also, for the folks who like this stuff, Hecl is still young, so there's lots of room to fiddle with the language itself, and learn about how a scripting language is built.

Astute observers will note that Hecl is similar to Jacl, but like the poster complaining about Jython getting a little bit out of date... it always seemed like a bit of a losing proposition to me to do a copy of a language in Java, because you miss out, if nothing else, on a *lot* of libraries, and the JRuby/Python/Tcl implementations have always seemed to be playing catch-up.

In a bit of blatant self promotion...

The Hecl Programming Language: http://www.hecl.org/

It's an open source scripting language that's compact enough to run on cell phones. If you're the adventurous/hacker type, it's still in the early stages of development, but is far along enough to write real apps, such as this shopping list system:

http://www.dedasys.com/shopping_list/

It's a great time to get involved in the project because it's in its early stages, and there is a lot of fun to be had!

So it's not what the previous poster meant, but here is a cool site with lots of 'cool hacks' open source software for mobile phones:

http://ngphone.com/j2me/opensource/

and hey, while I'm at it, I might as well mention my own project to do scripting for j2me, Hecl.

Hi,

A few comments:

"300+ million J2ME capable phones" shows that Sun has some savvy marketing people more than anything:-)

I do have some experience with j2me - I wrote Hecl for it, and found that it's a fun environment to work with, modulo the inconsistencies between phone models. It's really different from 'normal' Java though - you have to do a lot of things differently, and you have a very limited version of the standard library.

But in any case, my point was not really with regards to the embedded systems arena, but in terms of scaling down in human terms - being able to get more done faster without necessarily having the most capable developers out there.

I'm putting together a scripting language that targets j2me, called Hecl: http://www.hecl.org/, with the idea being that you can write quick apps/most of the app in a high level language and then add java bits as needed to do any heavy lifting. So far I have it running and last weekend started work on making the GUI portion of it. So far, so good. The language is also portable to other Java environments, so perhaps someone will find other interesting niches for it.

I read one of the links above, comparing Python and Lua, but it doesn't talk about sandboxes. Does Lua have one or does it just do multiple interpreters?

I have to say that Tcl is pretty good for this kind of thing too, although it is certainly bigger than Lua. It has sandboxes and multiple interpreters that you can control from both C and Tcl itself. You can also do threads, if you want. And the language is also pretty easy to learn for newcomers, like most scripting languages - especially considering the really friendly user community.

Of course, if you want really small, there are Tcl versions and related languages like Jim and Hecl .

I've been using gcj to develop Hecl ( http://www.hecl.org/ ) with, and so far I've been pretty happy. I found one compiler bug, which I reported and which was then promptly fixed. At FOSDEM, I also had occasion to go visit the Free Java developer room, and the impression I get is that these guys are making enough headway that it doesn't matter what Sun does at this point. Redhat had something like 3 or 4 very sharp developers (Tom Tromey, for instance) working more or less full time on gcj and ClassPath. Sure, Sun has way more people, but for now, all the free guys have to do is play catch up with the spec, not surpass Sun. That comes next;-)

By the way, I don't think blackdown is actually open source in that it's based on the Sun code.

I'm curious - does the new Fedora actually ship with gcj and gij as 'Java'? That will be an interesting development to watch.