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The Mobile & Embedded Community is a gathering place that enables and empowers developers to collaborate and innovate, driving the evolution and adoption of the Java(TM) Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) for mobile and embedded devices. Here you can be a part of a robust culture of developers and technology experts and find people with similar interests and goals. For more information, see our community vision.

Lightweight UI Toolkit is now open source

phoneME Feature MR3 released

Mobile, Media, and
eMbedded Developer Days: Call for Papers

Java on Windows Mobile

Java Mobility Podcast 56: PhoneME port to Play Station Portable

Max Mu shows off his Play Station Portable that is running a port of PhoneME. They are currently working on a port to Nintendo DS. (Sep 13, 2008)

Student projects in the Mobile & Embedded Community
Just a quick note: We are rolling out a number of student projects in the Mobile & Embedded Community. These are great opportunities for students (and educators) who want to get involved with mobile and embedded Java and open source...
(Sep 12, 2008)

Yoav Demoing LWUIT For SDN (Sun Developer Network)
Yoav Barel the manager of the operator group and a major driving force behind LWUIT is interviewed here in the Sun Developer network videos. Without Yoav's vision and support we wouldn't have LWUIT it would never have reached the market and never would have become open source. This discussion is a great summary introducing LWUIT.

phoneME performance rocks!
The folks over at BugLabs have been one of the earliest and most serious adopters of phoneME - they are using phoneME as the basis for their core product. Lately, they have done a series of performance tests to compare ... read more

Clone of a clone of a clone... but it has Java ME techonology!

What does it mean when there's a clone of a clone of an iPhone? That's what you have when you look at the Asus P552w (the name just rolls off the tongue, dudnit?). It's got a striking resemblance to the HTC Touch, which of course is one of the thousands of iPhone killers out there. — hinkmond
(Sep 09, 2008)

JustJava 2008, here I go!
Just Java 2008 is one of the greatest Java Conferences we have in Brazil. I will be there tomorrow with my fellow Giovani Salvador presenting about Java and Agile Methodologies. The title? Java Meets Agile “ A survival guide to adopt Agile inside Java teams — Daniel Wildt
(Sep 09, 2008)

Future Of BlackBerry Support

As some of you might know the BlackBerry has been a huge pain for us since day one, its the most buggy platform supported by LWUIT and the lowest quality VM of all. RIM is not a responsive vendor unlike Nokia/SE who are very accessible and open, to make matters worse we can't even purchase and use a device for testing since we don't have proper network access (we tried using USB cables but this didn't work either).

Lots and lots of MIDlet stores, galore!

Kim from MobileRated.com points out (and, rightly so!) in a recent blog comment that there are multiple MIDlet stores out there enabling Java ME developers to go around the carriers and OEMs to deploy their Java ME apps freely to customers on billions of Java ME devices. Cool. — hinkmond
(Sep 09, 2008)

ME Framework 1.2.1 Released
The ME Framework 1.2.1 release is now available on the download page. This release went through an extensive QA cycle and is ready to be used for test suite development. For more information see the ME Framework project.

Berlin conferences: Berlin.jar and OSiM World
It's been nice and quiet for a couple of weeks - no travel. Now the conference circuit is starting up again and so in a week I will head up to Berlin, Germany for two conferences: Berlin.jar is the first... — Terrence Barr
(Sep 08, 2008)

LWUIT Application Alert: PaderSyncFM & MyWidz

One of the cool surprises we get is when someone just releases a LWUIT application out of the blue. A couple of such applications came out recently that seem very cool and attractive ... — Shai Almog (noreply@blogger.com)
(Sep 07, 2008)

Third Wave Book?

Last week I had an enjoyable conversation with my old friend Randall Schwartz on Leo Laporte's TWiT.tv (which to my surprise was broadcast libe too). It was published on Friday ... The conversation - discussing Sun's open source strategy - is one I have had so many times over the last few months that I wonder if it would be worth writing a book ... — webmink
(Sep 06, 2008)

Mythbusters: Java ME Myths Get Busted

It's mind-boggling that there people who still believe the myths and falsehoods around Java ME technology ... — hinkmond
(Sep 06, 2008)

Using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in Java ME for Data Interchange
Choosing the right data interchange format is an important design decision when building any network-aware software. This is especially true when designing mobile and embedded applications, where attributes such as lightweight and efficient are important characteristics to consider ... In today's 'Tip of the Week' check out this new article by C. Enrique Ortiz published on SDN.

M&E Community Growth: 180 projects, almost 20,000 activities per month!
I've been wanting to post data on the growth of the M&E Community for some time now ... but somehow I always got distracted trying to pull together the stats. Turns out that compiling meaningful statistics is harder than you...

JT Harness 4.1.4 Milestone Release
The JT Harness 4.1.4 milestone release fixes various bugs in the harness. This release specifically addresses issues with the display of results and screen refresh functionality. JT Harness 4.1.4 provides complete backwards compatibility with JT Harness 4.1.3. For more information, visit the JT Harness project.

Java Mobility Podcast 55: Back to School Special

Diane Wolff and Melanie Crouch of Virgina Western Community College are starting a new degree program of mobile programming at their community college that is geared to meet the needs of the Roanoke, VA business community. (Sep 02, 2008)

Mobile Distillery training in Bay Area, Sept 16th
Tools-based parametric application development is an interesting and increasingly used approach to increase the range of target devices and addressable market while lowering development and deployment costs. One of the companies in this space is Mobile Distillery ... — Terrence Barr

Porting LWUIT - The LWUIT Micro Backend

Porting LWUIT is something I need to blog on more, which is something I fully intend to do. In the meantime Guillaume Legris sent us a link to a port he is working on ... — Shai Almog (noreply@blogger.com)
(Aug 31, 2008)

A Personal Data Storage Application With Embedded Java DB

Today I tackle embedding a database within a Java desktop application. Most of the tutorials I've run across talk about creating applications that connect with a database that is managed from a server. This is appropriate for most business applications. However, sometimes you might want to create a more portable application that carries its own data with it, such as an application in which a user manages personal data. — Patrick Keegan
(Aug 30, 2008)

New Palm Treo Pro w/pre-installed Java ME technology

It's so nice when something is already pre-installed when you buy it: leather seats in your car, central a/c in your house, Java ME technology in your cell phone, 120mm smooth bore cannon on your M1A1 Abrams tank... — hinkmond
(Aug 29, 2008)

Get real, Apple
Things aren't going so well for the iPhone and Apple these days. First, it appears that the much-anticipated 2nd generation iPhone (the iPhone 3G) doesn't actually perform that well on 3G networks - many users are reporting that 3G connectivity is... — Terrence Barr
(Aug 28, 2008)

Break out the marching band: New Samsung i900 Java ME cell phone

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Samsung marketing loves to launch their products with a lot of fanfare: marching bands, dancing girls, fireworks, blah, blah, blah. But... this is way COOL! :-) — hinkmond
(Aug 27, 2008)

Quick Updates...
Some quick updates about Kicking Butt with MIDP and MSA book, Marge Podcast at JavaOne and M3DD 2008 Call For Papers. — Bruno Ghisi
(Aug 27, 2008)

Touch Screen Support On The Samsung/Sprint Instinct Device
Chen and myself created a new video featuring some of the touch screen visual effects we demoed in the simulator here on the Instinct device.
No 3D transition effects are demoed since the device doesn't support JSR 184 (notice that LWUIT still runs unmodified on such a device!). We hope to upload additional such videos but most of our devices got confiscated by people around the office (our N95 is completely gone).

September: The Month of Java in Brazil
Let's imagine for a moment, a entire nation talking about Java technologies for a whole month. Think about Brazil then. From September 10th till September 30th, Brazil will have 16 Java conferences, thanks to power of Java User Groups all around. If you are anywhere near to Latin America, consider to drop by. — Mauricio Leal
(Aug 27, 2008)

Fire Eagle updates from your Java phone

With all the travel I'm doing lately I've been looking for a convenient way to keep people who are interested in getting in touch with me updated on my current whereabouts - I don't know about you but I... — Terrence Barr
(Aug 26, 2008)

Sentilla Labs: A New Java Community Website
Sentilla Labs, a recently launched community website, offers developers a step-by-step guided tour through the project development process, allowing visitors to download code and illustrations and rapidly bring projects to life. Some projects at Sentilla Labs can be created with fewer than 100 lines of code. In addition, developers can upload and display their own projects with confidence because they retain all rights to their code.

The Sentilla Perk
The Sentilla Perk is an innovative pervasive computing kit that comes with the hardware and software tools that allow you to develop novel applications for wireless sensors... — Qusay H. Mahmoud
(Aug 19, 2008)

Java Mobility Podcast 54: Kicking Butt with MIDP and MSA

Jonathan Knudsen talks about his new book, Kicking Butt with MIDP and MSA and his tutorial on the Light Weight UI Toolkit. (Aug 20, 2008)

Comparing LWUIT and JavaFX Mobile
Open sourcing LWUIT last week has created a lot of buzz - the response has been phenomenally positive. We've also gotten a few questions regarding the relationship of LWUIT and the upcoming JavaFX Mobile platform - there still seems to... — Terrence Barr
(Aug 19, 2008)

Falling In Love With My Sentilla Perk Kit

I got a Sentilla Perk Kit. This is my first introductory post showing how to set up the environment and create a simple Hello World. — Bruno Ghisi
(Aug 19, 2008)

Pimp My LWUIT!
This is part one of hopefully a long series covering UI customizations in LWUIT, it is written mostly for the programmers among us and to a lesser extent for the designers (although they can probably grab ideas from here/make them beautiful). I will try to cover as many grounds of UI look as possible, from advanced rendering concepts to animations and customizations. ... — Shai Almog (noreply@blogger.com)

New SDN articles
Sun Developer Network (SDN) has published two new articles, both very worthwhile reads:

Ask the Experts: Java FX Preview, August 18-22
The recently released JavaFX Preview helps early adopters become familiar with JavaFX. Got a question? Post it during this session and get answers from three key members of Sun's JavaFX engineering team.

New LWUIT Eye Candy Video
The LWUIT team just posted this new video to youtube showing off some of the latest features in LWUIT together with some tried and true features. Check out the drag & drop functionality and "swing-in/swing-up" dialogs and menus. Very cool!

Teaching Mobile Computing to Generation C

The Computer Science curriculum needs to be updated to reflect today's reality. Read this interview for information about integrating mobile devices into the CS curriculum... — Qusay H. Mahmoud
(Aug 14, 2008)

Enterprise option for Java ME technology

Mobile Enterprise - the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of Sun's Mobile Enterprise Platform (MEP). Its five-year mission: To explore strange new devices. To seek out new cell phones and new services. To boldly go where no mobile enterprise sofware has gone before. — hinkmond
(Aug 14, 2008)

Todays featured java.net article: An Introduction to the Lightweight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT)
Java ME allows us to write applications that are, generally speaking, portable across a wide range of small devices that support the platform. While the basic functionalities usually work well on all supported devices, the area that does pose problems for developers is the user interface. ... It is in this context that the arrival of Lightweight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT) is so exciting.

LWUIT released as open source!
Sun introduced the Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) to the developer community at JavaOne this year. And today, as promised, the complete LWUIT source is being released into open source! Read more ... Terrence Barr

More technical details on the release in the LWUIT blog
The official "On The Record" announcement

Super Monkey Ball - Tip N Tilt: Java ME game for your phone

From what I can tell about this Java ME game, you're not just a monkey in a clear ball rolling around collecting bananas, but you're a super monkey in a clear ball rolling around collecting bananas. Yeah. Much different... riiiight. — hinkmond
(Aug 13, 2008)

Free, free, free: Free Java ME games!

The 3 best words you like to hear when it comes to Java ME games: free, free, and free. Here's QuicklyBored.com's take on how to get around the carrier's stranglehold and get all those Java ME games that you've ever wanted... for free! — hinkmond
(Aug 14, 2008)

Gartner: Sun Vendor Rating - Open Source upgraded to "Strong Positive"
Gartner grades Sun as Overall Positive in a recent report. Gartner published its new vendor rating for Sun Microsystems, Inc. in June 2008, rating the company as positive.

T-Mobile taking a bite from the Apple playbook

T-Mobile is rumored to be starting up an App Store themselves, just like Apple has for the iPhone -- except T-Mobile is smarter and will offer Java ME apps instead of the more limited iPhone apps. That's using their noggin. — hinkmond
(Aug 08, 2008)

REST and Java ME

Everybody is talking about REST and RESTful Web Services. Let's take a micro looking into it and see how to deal with JSON, XML and other related stuff in Java ME ! — Bruno Ghisi
(Aug 13, 2008)

Google's Android sinking further and further into quicksand

When a technical project like Google's Android is mired in the quicksand of slipping delivery dates and bailing developers (who are abandoning Android faster than rodents from a sinking Titanic), it's hard for all those still stuck in that quicksand to see all the struggling just makes them sink faster into the pit. — hinkmond
(Aug 08, 2008)

Case Study on Java DB (Derby)

Francois Orsini's case study on micro kernel architectures and Java DB (Apache Derby) contains some very good references and ideas about the topic. Francois discussed the evolution of the micro kernel architectures and notes some of its modern uses. — Masood Mortazavi
(Aug 12, 2008)

Holy Heckle and Jeckle: Scripting for MIDP/Java ME technology

David N. Welton pointed out (in one of my blog post comments) that he has a cool tool for writing MIDlets from a Web browser using his and Wolfgang Kechel's open source Mobile scripting language called Hecl. — hinkmond
(Aug 11, 2008)

Third ME Framework 1.2 Development Release
The third development release of ME Framework 1.2 has been just made available for download. This is the last scheduled development release for version 1.2 and we tried to integrate as many outstanding features as possible. We will continue working on bug fixes during the next few weeks before freezing the 1.2 branch for the final 1.2 QA cycles.

Growing bigger and badder: Java ME open source phoneME

Bigger and badder: The popularity of phoneME Advanced keeps growing and growing. Roger Brinkley pointed out that markmail.org keeps statistics of our https://phoneme.dev.java.net mail forums since we open sourced Java ME technology way back in aught six. Look at that nice upward trend line! :-)

(Aug 06, 2008)