William Volk <bvolk@bonusmobile.com> wrote:
>
> Question is, Will Sun step up to the plate and start to enforce a true
> portable standard for J2ME? In any case, this will get interesting.
>
In my experience, J2ME works best when a carrier specifies the set of
baseline capabilities and the set of required extensions. Docomo was
the first to do this well. Sprint in the US and Vodafone (world) have
followed suit.
With Docomo, I've actually been able to develop, in the US, an iAppli
for a new handset series (e.g., 505), based solely on the Japanese
specs, email the build to Japan, and have it work the first time on a
handset I've never seen -- and then have it run almost perfectly on
every other handset of the series, each made by a different
manufacturer. I never *expect* this to happen but it's happened a
couple times, and I thank Docomo for their stewardship of the spec.
My experience in the US with Sprint has been more frustrating, but
ultimately successful once the additional hurdles have been passed.
My experience developing for carriers that did not have such a firm
hand on their J2ME specs has been even more frustrating.
Nevertheless, I have, with great effort, developed MIDlets where a
single build *will* run on the majority of MIDP-2.0 handsets (all
gazillion million of them). And so has Google, or they're getting to
that point fast.
Two of the biggest problems in the way of run-everywhere are (1) APN
settings and (2) CA root certificates. These are independent of the
J2ME implementation, but, once again, the carrier can preconfigure
these.
Received on Mon Dec 5 21:58:28 2005