J2ME Polish 1.0

Reader enough2000 writes "After nine months of intense programming, J2ME Polish 1.0 has now been released on j2mepolish.org. J2ME Polish is a GPL'd suite of tools, of which every one meets a definite need of J2ME developers. It includes an Ant based build tool, an integrated device database, an UI which can be designed using simple CSS-textfiles, a game-engine and a logging framework. I'm the developer of this suite and would like to know your opinions and suggestions for future versions."

Comments

Argh.

[Apiakun]

Hello? Is this thing on? *tap-tap-tap*

Re:Argh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? HAHAHA

why Polish?

[LeninZhiv]

No offense to the Poles (who in my opinion make the world's best sausage), but wouldn't more widely spoken languages like French, Spanish, or Russian address a more urgent need than Polish? Sure, the more i18n that gets done the better, but I don't see why most slashdot readers should be particularly interested in this...

(clicks on link)

oh, wait a minute...

Re:why Polish?

[gl4ss]

the name isn't the best
(hell, it fooled me at first) imho but it does work, it's about making j2me apps look better and about helping you when building for multiple different platforms(preprocessor kinda stuff, some phones have different capabilities and extensions).

there's game I coded using the gameapi in midp2 that now works somewhat in midp1 phones as well when build by using j2me polish(the game itself was done for an upcoming article and the j2me polish author fixed a lot of stuff in the gameapi implementation so now it's playable on midp1 phones with minor graphical glitches).

Re:why Polish?

[seasunset]

Just a minor (a bit offtopic I know) information point: French is not as widely spoken as most people think. Its not the "second language after english" as most people tend to think. Have a look e.g. here

Re:why Polish?

[XemonerdX]

French is not as widely spoken as most people think.

Merde!

Re:why Polish?

[Pippity]

Bordel!

Quality over quanitity

[Anonymous Coward]

And this makes the front page of slashdot?

As in TurtleWax

[tod_miller]

J2ME Polish, as in wax on, wax off...

I will definately look into this, a game engine? CSS layouts? *droooll* oh man this is awesome!

For practical people who preffer extraction and reporting languages, please let us mere mortals bask in this little triumph.

In 2 years Java on a mobile device will be so awesome! Hurrah for Java!

OK, back to superwaba hacking.... :-/

Re:As in TurtleWax

[wayward]

It's great that it will work in Eclipse and some other IDEs (like JBuilder). I wish the Sharp Zaurus was one of the supported devices. They do have a good variety already, though - a lot of cell phones and RIM's Blackberry devices.

Re:As in TurtleWax

[tod_miller]

I though the sharp zaurus had the best support for java anyway, sun have a download just for the zaurus on thier site... Had much luck programming java on your zaurus?

What is it like developing interfaces? Try superwaba if you like, great for interfaces.

Re:As in TurtleWax

[wayward]

To be honest, I haven't done much Java development yet on my Zaurus, but it's hopefully going to be one of my summer projects. I've been trying to decide whether to use the default Linux on it, or to flash OpenZaurus onto it. The J2ME Polish project seems impressive, though, and I may look into porting it.

Re:As in TurtleWax

[enough2000]

Hi Guys, thanks for the feedback. The GUI of J2ME Polish works on almost any J2ME capable device, so it usually does not need to be ported. The build tools of J2ME Polish (preprocessing, compiling, preverification, obfuscation, packaging, etc) are device independent anyhow. Best regards - Robert

The state of mobile development

[tod_miller]

Currently there is a Great place to devleop for mobile devices. The personal profile for J2me. This gives you lots of power for development.

You can download a linux only SDK for this right now, I haven;t tried it. Device support is 0 right now I think.

J2ME has two modes, a WAPesque card mode, where you decide what you want, but have no idea what it will look like, and a canvas mode (gaming) where you can draw things...

I rather distain the current J2ME, it placed a lot of focus on some really lame devices that noone really cares about anymore... so by the time it is usable we are waiting for something more powerful.

Until I am developing in Personal Profile, I will be using superwaba (www.superwaba.com.br) which was base on waba. It has bugs, but, you can knock up a sexy looking interface in seconds.

Problems with Superwaba - it allocates memory though a palm database driver (as far as I can tell) meaning each object or array is limited to 64kb, so you have to have some work arounds...

For serious applications, we can only wait... anyone had some experience with personal profile?

Re:The state of mobile development

[gl4ss]

nokia communicators and uiq phones(p800/p900) support personal java.

the state of the things as it is now is that you don't usually have the liberty of choosing what tools to use since you're not in liberty to choose the target device.. so for anything that can be done in j2me midp, using j2me is best if you want somebody to be able to use the app.

Re:The state of mobile development

[enough2000]

To the first J2ME "mode" you mention: "you decide what you want, but have not idea what it will look like":

This "mode" is actually what the J2ME Polish GUI is changing. You can use the normal Form, List, StringItem etc but you can design this stuff with CSS. Which I think is kinda cool. Also it has a "fallback" mode for devices which are not powerful enough to support the GUI - in that case it just uses the native GUI of the device. Voila!

You can find more info about this stuff at the introduction.

Re:The state of mobile development

[cosmo42]

Nokia 9500 will have Personal Profile.
I'm working on it and it'll be cool. AWT
apps work without or with very little modification.

Btw Sharp Zaurus and PocketPC also have PP.

Re:The state of mobile development

[tod_miller]

Do they support the Personal Profile, which != Personal Java...

In this instance I do have the liberty of choosing the devices... but I agree, J2ME is great for many tools, but enterprise applications? The development costs are high... with J2ME Polish they are reduced.

Good work folks

Re:The state of mobile development

[tod_miller]

Yeah the site was good, I realised immediately that is it an extension of the J2ME interface mode, I looked it all up about a month ago when deciding.

As I am doing PDA UI intensive work, superwaba is best.

I'll see when I want to write a neat game :-)

Re:The state of mobile development

[gl4ss]

**Personal Profile, which != Personal Java**

my bad was mixing the two up.

which (confusion) might very well be why sun seems to be 'hating' it.

who came up with the name?

[cylcyl]

Judging by the other posts, it is one of the most confusing project names I've seen. Besides, other than

Java Polish - (prog lang) (lang)
Java Polish - (coffee) (lang)
Java Polish - (coffee flavored) (shining abrasive)
Java Polish - (prog lang) (variant spec to poland)
etc.

The ways of confusing the name is just ridiculus

Polish?

[Anonymous Coward]

J2ME? You can't polish a turd.

Re:Polish?

[Ath]

You sure can polish a turd. There are plenty of cultures that polish them, encase them in some type of clear material, and then sell them as jewelry.

ewesoft

[kedge]

Ewesoft http://www.ewesoft.com/ is also available. It is derived from waba but targetted to PocketPC and the Sharp Zaurus. I have begun looking at game development with it and some of the classes in the ewe.graphics namespace make developing games very easy.

Re:ewesoft

[RevAaron]

Pfft. What liars! On their site they say:

"The Most Portable VM Available"

Pfft. Every platform listed is supported by Squeak Smalltalk, with the exception of the JVM itself, though it makes up for it by supporting many other platforms, including Psion/EPOC32.

Sorry, not really relevant, but I hate it when developers make claims that aren't true. :P

Bad license choice.

[MisterFancypants]

There is a good reason why most projects of this type choose the LGPL as their license. Using the GPL will pretty much ensure that this project won't get used by any serious third parties.

And before anyone flames me, yeah, I realize the guy is free to license his code under whatever license he chooses and I can choose to not use it. In either case, it doesn't really matter to me since I don't program in Java. I'm just noting that he made a somewhat odd choice.

Re:Bad license choice.

[enough2000]

Hi MisterFancypants, the GPL ensures the freedom of the project, and also this project is licensed commercially as well (like Trolltech's QT for example).

Where was this 18 months ago?

[idries]

I had to write a whole bunch of hacked tools to do this sort of thing when I was working on J2ME. I'm glad that someone has created a real solution, getting all this stuff to work on a deadline was a real pain.

Well done.

What a sweet tool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks very promising indeed - I'll definitly check this out! A killer feature would be a helper for internationalization, though... This is really a pain in the arse with j2me.

For more info about J2ME....

[Eric Giguere]

A lot of developers are confused about J2ME, I have some overviews on my site at www.ericgiguere.com/j2me that should clear things up somewhat, including my handy-dandy J2ME acronym list.

Things are getting more exciting in the J2ME world, though I'd like to see more devices supporting the Personal Profile come on the market. It's interesting what people can do with today's devices and the quite-limited-in-comparison Mobile Information Device Profile.

Eric

Is there J2ME Reverse Polish ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am really unused to Polish notation - I prefer Reverse Polish one - as in HP calculators ...