Chaotic Java

I’ve recently asked out loud why the Mobility Pack is not available for Mac OS X downloads. Java being “Write Once, Run Everywhere” and NetBeans is carrying the flag of “using only standard Java packages”, that fact seemed weird to me.

Lukas answered the post by saying that in order for NetBeans’ Mobility Pack be available on the Mac, it needs to become a more interesting platform for J2ME development. In other words, there aren’t enough J2ME developers working on the Mac platform. In addition, he said that companies providing emulators usually do so for Windows and Linux, but not for the Mac.

He is correct, though. Currently, the only Mac emulator I know of is MPowerPlayer, provided for free for developers. It seems good enough – And I know it’s a shame people can’t play with Mobility as I know that just by showing Mobility Pack to a few friends (dotNet developers, no less!) they downloaded NetBeans at home and started playing with it. I can’t imagine them giving the same reaction if I showed them how I hand-code a MIDP application.

Lukas also provided a link to the “no Mobility Pack for Mac bug” in the NetBeans bug list, and told me to vote for it. Now, I implore you, the Mac developer: Vote for this bug. Even if you don’t work with J2ME today, you might want to do that in the future – And just like we, new-age programmers, don’t hand-code (or at least, don’t want to hand-code) Swing Forms, J2EE Deployment XMLs and even Ant scripts, we don’t want to hand-code J2ME forms.

So, vote for Mobility Pack on the Mac!

Now, if you haven’t seen the mobility pack RC2 for NetBeans 5, go and download it now. Seriously. Even if you don’t want to develop anything for a cellular phone, even if it doesn’t interest you in the slightest manner. Just do it.

I played with it a little bit today, and even though I am not much of a fan for mobile device programming, I couldn’t help giving out a “wow”. For a mere 20 MB download (80 MB including NetBeans) you get a great tool, and that can’t be neglected. These are my thoughts:

Things I liked

• The Form EditorThe editor is just slick. It makes you feel like editing a window form. It’s easy, it’s drag-and-drop, it has a components toolbox – Anything you’d expect, but inside a ceullular phone form.
• Generated code The generated code is just incredible. I’ve tried MIDP in the past, and the most horrible part is listening to the phone’s buttons events, and then deciding on what component the user was highlighting when the button was clicked. NetBeans Mobility creates the entire code for you, leaving you with only writing your application’s logic.
• Form Traversal If you’ve ever worked with Java Studio Creator, you’ve seen it had a “flow” for pages, where a certain event would trigger a movement between web forms. The same thing in Mobility: Connect between cellular forms in a graphical environment; Mobility will do the rest.
• Read only code Just like in Matisse, the generated code – form traversal, event and sender decisions talked about before – Are read only, preventing the developer from accidently ruining some sensitive auto-generated code.

Things I hope to see

Even though Mobility is a great tool for mobile device programming, there are some things I wished I saw there.

• Support for Graphical phones With phones becoming more and more advanced, and JSR 184 (Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME) already released, a package of pre-made graphical controls could have been created and integrated with the editor to help create richer applications.
• Connectivity to J2EE Since J2ME provides no RMI library, and J2EE requires it, a proxy is required, which is described in this presentation. If NetBeans Mobility could provide a way to automate this process, and to graphically design a connection between a form and an EJB, would make so many things just a lot simpler.

Conclusions

Haven’t you heard? Try it!