Conclusion

With more than two million programmers, Java is an enormously popular development platform. As a language, it is easy to learn and subsequently master, and it comes prepackaged as a robust, secure, portable, and scalable platform. All of these elements make Java an excellent tool for the micro world.

Things aren't that simple, though. J2SE is too large to fit into the limited capabilities of micro devices, and a lot of the functionality, such as AWT and Swing, isn't applicable or useful anyway.

With J2ME, Sun elected to create a version of Java suited to the weird and wonderful micro world. In the next chapter, you'll take a look at exactly what they came up with.