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Micro Software
To get a feel for J2ME's place in the landscape, take a look at the world of micro devices. As you can see in Figure 1.5, there are roughly five categories of micro devices.
Figure 1.5. The broad categories of micro devices. (Note: One of these categories is rather silly. Can you spot which one? That's right, it's pagers!)
Over the past decade, micro device manufacturers have generally (sometimes reluctantly) provided programmers and other content creators with various levels of tools to build software applications. There have also been industry attempts to create standard software platforms, which have met with varying degrees of success. Table 1.1 lists some of the development tools used in the recent past.
|
Tool |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Manufacturer SDK |
The most common development platform was using device manufacturer or operating system (such as Palm, Windows CE, and EPOC/Psion) SDKs (Software Development Kits). In most cases, developers would use C/C++. |
|
WAP/WML |
WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), a standard communications protocol used in mobile devices, is used in a similar way to HTTP and TCP. An early Internet system developed by mobile phone operators used WAP as transport for WML (Wireless Markup Language) which serves as a replacement for the more complex HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) used by Web browsers. Unfortunately, the end result was nothing like the "mobile internet" promised by promoters. |
|
Web/HTML |
Available only to the higher-level devices, the Web was sometimes used as a content delivery tool. Content was usually cosmetically modified to suit the characteristics of micro devices. |
|
Other middleware |
Many vendors have also tried to create content-creation middleware and tools such as i-mode and BREW with varying degrees of success. |
NOTE
I-mode
The Japanese market has a hugely popular system known as i-mode. This simple protocol was used to distribute content similarly to WAP. In my opinion, its early success compared to WAP was due to some simple differences, which include the following:
It was a closed market, so content was targeted and relevant.
The audience size quickly reached critical mass.
The carrier (NTT DoCoMo) played a big part in the technology implementation (actually, they invented it), and therefore had significant business motivation to see it succeed.
It was delivered over a packet-switched network, as opposed to a circuit-switched network, so there was no inconvenient dial-up delay.
It had color graphics. Mmmm.
The content was fun.
I-mode has since gone on to greater things (including support for Java), but that's a story for another chapter.
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