Mobile Development Platforms: J2ME and Android

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http://selectioneffect.info/blog/mobile/mobile-development-platforms-j2me-and-android/

The core of mobile application development has been J2ME for many years. Nokia was probably the most stable platform, especially with their Symbian platform, in a certain sense, was the forerunner of today’s Android ecosystem.

Blackberry was the next revolution, with RIM providing a very capable back-end system for their corporate customers. Blackberry phones were the first true smart phones, and were the first to offer good value for money to the businessperson. Today they also cater for any consumer, and they are actually much more popular and capable than is the perception.

Mobile application development is the umbrella turn that covers phones, smart phones and tablets.

J2ME/WAP

This is where it all started. I’ve written many MIDP 2.0 profile applications, and WAP applications for the early days of mobile programming. Most phones still ship with a Java VM, and all of the games that the network operator installs by default on most devices are Java apps.

I could not imagine not having Bejeweled on my old LG phone, which is a smartphone, but aging a bit now.

J2ME is not really on it’s way out any time soon, but of course these days there are better platforms available to the discerning mobile developer.

Android

Android has the biggest market share of all the mobile ecosystems, and they are also the most accessible. Google has created a specification for the hardware and software required to run every version of the Android operating system, which ensures that an application written for Android 2.1 will run on any device that supports that version of the OS. Conversely, if the hardware can support a specific Android version, then the user can select an application that can make use of this by using the OS version as the selection criteria. Most devices can also support a higher version of Android than they were shipped with.

The user can currently choose between Android Marketplace and Amazon App Store to get one of hundreds of thousands of business or entertainment apps.

The development platform is very rich: all skills from J2ME or even J2SE are directly transferable to Android. The main development language for the platform is Java, with some native capabilities in C/C++ also possible.

The documentation and examples for the Android platform is far more detailed and useful than any API I’ve ever seen.

The whole OS is open source, and you can research anything down to any level, both in the hardware and software, to solve any niggling issue.

Support for the platform is provides as community websites, or on Google’s Android Developer web site: http://developer.android.com/index.html

The Android SDK is available to download free of charge, and can run as an emulator without needing a hardware device. Eclipse + Android SDK = Really Easy Development

While the Android tablet and phone devices used to have differing Android OS editions, the “Android Ice Cream Sandwich” release, which is the codename for Android OS 4, will unify both smartphone and tablet devices.

Other articles in this series:

• iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod)
• Blackberry
• Windows Phone 7
• Nokia
• Mono on mobiles
• JQuery for Mobiles