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John Carmack's Cell Phone Adventures
Mr. Carmack has updated his blog with news of his latest interests. Apparently mobile gaming on cell phones has consumed a large portion of his time of late, and he has some witty commentary on programming for the emerging game platform. From the article: "I'm not a cell phone guy. I resisted getting one at all for years, and even now I rarely carry it. To a first approximation, I don't really like talking to most people, so I don't go out of my way to enable people to call me. However, a little while ago I misplaced the old phone I usually take to Armadillo, and my wife picked up a more modern one for me. It had a nice color screen and a bunch of bad java game demos on it. The bad java games did it."
A true geek :)
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I remember a time when scamming your customers wasn't a common business strategy.
Actually I don't, but wouldn't it be nice if people tried to do things in order to make a good job instead of just ripping people off? Ah well, I can always dream I guess.
The Java platform that runs on most cell phones is J2ME, which is a completely different animal than J2SE, the one that's used on PCs.
The differences are substantial. For example, some J2ME VM's don't garbage collect. Ever. That's because in some cases, it's not required.
To say that the J2SE (or J2EE) plaforms suck because a particular J2ME implementation is slow is like saying that internal combustion engines suck because your go-kart can only go 15 mph.
Not yet. The problem with j2me is that there are so many implementations (and some of them really suck) of it. Some have JIT, some don't. There are a lot of hardware/software combinations. And that makes testing really hard. Of course you have the same problem if you move to another language. Because of that, there is not a lot to choose from. Brew and J2ME are basically it. Brew is optimized for gaming and J2ME targets a wider variety of software applications. Brew is a traditional, proprietary solution whereas J2ME is much more open with free development kits, documentation, etc. As Carmack notes, it is much easier to get started with it.
An additional problem is that the core J2ME specs don't cover much functionality. All the interesting stuff is in optional modules which may or may not be implemented on a J2ME phone. There's a whole range of J2ME specifications that may or may not be implemented.
John Carmack reasons very simple from a game developer point of view. Basically anything that gets in the way of direct access to the hardware annoys him. This way of thinking about writing software is not really suitable for mobile development. The problem with writing software for mobile phones (and pdas) is that you need to target as much phones as possible because typically a phone will only be on the market for a short period of time (a few months) and there are a lot of different phones. So if you want marketshare, forget about native C, direct on hardware type solutions. You need to abstract from as much hardware (cpu, memory, screen size, network, storage, input) and software details (which j2me specs, native os, jit or no jit) as possible. That's what J2ME is all about.
Jilles