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Nokia to Become Involved in Eclipse Development

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hands-on dept.

jondaw writes "Builder UK says that Nokia is to become more involved in the direction of the Open Source IDE, Eclipse. 'Nokia has increased its level of involvement in the Eclipse project by becoming a board member and strategic developer. It will take the lead in developing tools for mobile applications based on the Eclipse platform. One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.'"

24 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Amusing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Between this and the last article, it begins to seem like IBM is doing more than Sun is to take the leadership position in Java lately.

    I wonder how Harmony is doing...

  2. Great news... or is it? by mikaelhg · · Score: 3, Informative

    Having used Nokia's horrible, horrible developer tools, I sincerely wish that they will not contribute any code which in any way resembles the current quality of their tools.

    Of course, this could be a brand new opportunity for them to turn their sledge around, as they say in Finland.

    1. Re:Great news... or is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      you don't say what the problem with their tools are. i developed applications for series 40 phones and everything they provided worked fine. documentation on the phones was good. emulator had no problems. i used netbeans and netbeans mobility, which i had no problem with (but isn't nokia's tool).

      i think if you look at some other phone maker's developers sites you'll be surprised that nokia is probably the best. a lot of other companies have very limited or poor documentation on the phones. i think nokia could make their instructions for getting started clearer. it's a little difficult to get started cause you may not know what all you need to download and how to setup your environment, but all the information is on their site.

      i think maybe you had problems with the ide you used and blame nokia. remember all the phone company needs to provide you with is the sdk, documentation, and emulator. there really isn't any other "tools" they provide.

    2. Re:Great news... or is it? by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      you've had the pleasure of only dealing with the j2me emulators, which are of ok quality and certainly of good quality when compared to most of the competition. the documentation isn't bad and it's easy enough to mess around. however, some of the emulators from them take ages to start up and are _heavy_(especially those based on the crap wins symbian 'emu' - that would be the s60 emus).

      but as a whole for example the symbian devkits are a horrible mess, bad documentation, unworking example code etc..

      some other pc apps from nokia aren't that hot either, often eating tens of megabytes memory for no apparent reason and yesterday installing pc suite fucked up some msxml dll on my laptop too(after getting the dll from web and regsvr32'ing it .net2003 started again, luckily).

      besides.. for eclipse, eclipseme totally rocks and supports nokias emulators as well.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  3. ambitious... by moviepig.com · · Score: 3, Funny
    Nokia to Become Involved in Eclipse Development

    Next quarter, they'll expand into terra-forming...

    --
    Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
  4. IMHO, I don't think this means much. by Mustang+Matt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think what this means is Nokia has been using eclipse for a while and they've noticed some ways to make it easier to develop for their phones so they're going to write some plugins and maybe do a small amount of core work.

    Eclipse really is an incredible java ide. I'd be thrilled to see someone extend it or create an IDE for PHP that was on the same level of quality as ecipse. (And no the 1-2 PHP plugins for Eclipse aren't even remotely in the same ball park.)

    I would go as far to say that Eclipse itself has been such a pleasure to work with that it's encouraged me to write more java. If you haven't checked it out, you're really missing out.

    --
    The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
    1. Re:IMHO, I don't think this means much. by LDoggg_ · · Score: 3, Informative

      What's wrong with phpeclipse ? It's based on the excellent eclipse webtools project.
      Seems to do everything I'd expect a PHP IDE to do.

      I've even used it on the natively compiled eclipse that comes with fedora core 4

      --

      "If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
  5. Nokia should fix themselves first by The+G · · Score: 4, Informative

    One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.

    How about, instead of that, they try to make their own phones have full support for J2ME? Nokia wouldn't know a standard-compliant MIDP implementation if it bit them in the ass, and they actually charge you a couple hundred bucks to report bugs in their phones to anyone with a clue.

    I appreciate Eclipse, but none of my company's code can use it. Know why? Because of the huge piles of conditional compilation and build scripts that we need to build separate applications for each of Nokia's phones, because no two have the same set of gross standards-noncompliances; Nokia has done more than any company I know of to make "write once run anywhere" the joke that it is.

    Nokia should get their own house in order before they try to grub up open-source PR.

    1. Re:Nokia should fix themselves first by Oniros · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Honnestly Nokia is not the only one with those issues, about every single vendor is non-compliant and require some workarounds for each handset.

      http://www.vortoj.com/sjpp/ comes in handy to have conditional code and still be able to use an IDE.

      It would be nice if the j2me emulators could run in the debugger consistently though. Maybe Nokia could help improve that.

    2. Re:Nokia should fix themselves first by bojanb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Funny, for the two years I've been working with J2ME, I've found Nokia's MIDP implementations to be the most compliant. Their phones are split into Series 30, 40, 60 and 80 devices (and a few editions), and each group has clearly defined capabilities.

      Have you worked with other manufacturers' phones? Don't tell me that Nokia has worse standards compliance than e.g. SonyEricsson P910i, which looks like its "Java support" was written by a stoned teenager over a weekend...

  6. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  7. because.. by elfguygmail.com · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Java is used on well over half the mobile phones out there (other ones being BREW), and recent Symbian OS (serie 60) are used only by some Nokia phones and like one panasonic. So it makes more sense for software makers to target the Java market.

  8. Re:Nokie Tech by rm69990 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hopefully, somewhere down the road, this will enhance the quality of their mobile phones. One of the old Nokia cell phones I used had a few defects; for example, the battery compartment always wanted to slip off. But one has to wonder, exactly, what kind of direction Nokia is headed. Do they really think this is good news for the millions who use their products everyday? I think that taking chances like this may turn into a sour deal for them. Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!

    How is Nokia investing in software development tools going to help them improve the quality of the physical components of their phones, such as battery compartments? I very highly doubt the plastic case of the phone was programmed in Java :-P

    As for their users, this is for developers, not users. Users don't write phone software, developers do.

    Overall....one very weird comment.

  9. Re:And when they announced it by ashridah · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, they do.
    Eclipse Con 2006

    There's also just recently been a bunch of them. Second or so one since eclipse went opensource, and a whole bunch of organisations that jumped on board are starting to show off cool stuff
    (including the eclipse foundation themselves, there's been a number of nifty improvements)

  10. Surprising by oliderid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For those involved in the mobile world. We had to quit the MIDP 2.0 market due to the severe limitations imposed by the myriad of constructors APIs. And even under the constructor umbrella you have to face different series with their own spec.

    J2ME is a doomed environment. They needed years to come with a basic standard like MIDP 2.0 . And Bluetooth and other mobile features aren't even part of it.

    It looks exactly like the micro computer market in the early 80's. And guess what...Who has the most "easy" environment for developers. Yes you name it. M***

    Well thx There are still Blackberry for Java coders like me.

  11. Nokia... Please amend the last sentence to: by DA_MAN_DA_MYTH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME on a Mac.

    --
    "It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
  12. J2ME (soon to have J22K then J2XP? ) by Old+Wolf · · Score: 2, Funny

    Jave has a Millennium Edition now?

    Also, I wonder if they could contribute to Eclipse by making it faster. Eclipse runs like a dog on my 900MHz CPU , it's even slower than JBuilder (which is saying something). It doesn't have much more functionality than older IDEs which ran fine on a 100MHz CPU (it can put squiggles under spelling mistakes and it can make your code disappear under little arrows, but that's about it...)

    1. Re:J2ME (soon to have J22K then J2XP? ) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Jave has a Millennium Edition now?

      I hope you're trying to be funny. The M in J2ME stands for mobile.

      It doesn't have much more functionality than older IDEs which ran fine on a 100MHz CPU (it can put squiggles under spelling mistakes and it can make your code disappear under little arrows, but that's about it...)

      You obviously haven't spent the time to actually learn what functionality Eclipse provides. As for speed, Eclipse 3.1 for Linux ran perfectly fine on my AMD Duron 1GHz (before I upgraded). If you haven't tried 3.1, it is faster than 3.0 (it even loads quicker).

      In any case, the amount of time it saves me in productivity more than makes up for the interface being slow. Using Eclipse almost feels like I'm playing a video game with all the keyboard controls and code completion that helps me get my work done quicker. I heard someone on here say that Eclipse is the Emacs of this decade.

    2. Re:J2ME (soon to have J22K then J2XP? ) by owlstead · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Eclipse runs fine on computers below 1 GHz *if* you give it enough memory to use. Eclipse is a parsing IDE (it parses everything you type) with many other advanced features (many more over .NET beta, which is only touching the surface of parsing editors). This is something entirely different than a simple spelling checker. Only the VE is a bit of a memory/CPU hog, but if you see how it works, this should not come as a surprise.

      Anyway, as a developer I urge you to use a more recent computer system. Advanced IDE tend to use a lot of processing power. Use that old machine for testing your own applications, to make sure they run smoothly on other people's machines.

      Squiggles under spelling mistakes...Grrr....

  13. Convertible by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd love to see Nokia's contribution to Eclipse let me see when my Java project exceeds the J2ME distro libraries/APIs/boundaries. And automate refactoring code down to J2ME size. In other words, make J2ME a mode rather than a target platform. So I can just write Java applets and see when it won't "fit" on a mobile device, then "crop" it. Like trying to put a big image on a small canvas.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  14. Re:why java?! by w42w42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If Nokia releases a dev kit for Symbian, they are marketing Symbian's product - not their own. They also fall into the same problem Intel and MSFT have been in for the last fifteen years, trying to move existing customers to a new platform if they ever decide they don't like the one they're on.

    By targeting Java, they get to have freedom of choice on what they develop their next phone with, without worrying about the existing software that will not be able to follow.

  15. Bye bye "The Trouble with Open Source" by cheros · · Score: 2, Informative

    That puts a rather harsh spike through quite a few premises in that BCS piece "The trouble with Open Source". Not that it was brilliant to start with, but this is simply Yet Another Example Of A Company Deriving Value From Contributing To Open Source.

    I can't for a moment see Nokia (or Novell, or IBM, or CA or etc,etc,etc) contribute if they didn't think it would offer payback. They have shareholders too.

    There's an excellent piece in teh Harvard Business Review which compares events at Toyota with the Open Source movement in general and (amazingly) manages to draw large parallels. It's a very fascination article - I must see if I can somehow convince them of opening it up to a much wider audience.

    --
    Insert .sig here. Send no money now. Owner may sue, contents will settle. Batteries not included.
  16. Existing Eclipse J2ME plugin by Mariani · · Score: 2, Informative

    This nice plugin just turned 1.1.0 and I can recommend it to all, EclipseME.

  17. Why Eclipse by LoonyMike · · Score: 2, Funny

    Nokia's display technology doesn't perform very well under direct sunlight