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!