Mobile group drops Java price against Apple and Android

Mobile phone providers are fighting back against Apple and Google by cutting the cost of doing business using Java on mobile. The Unified Test Initiative, a body comprising handset and service providers, has slashed the price it charges Java Mobile Edition (Java ME) developers to test and verify their work properly on …

[Adrian 10]

Who?

or should that be who cares? ;-)

[c 1]

UTI?

Urinary Tract Infection - an apt name for anything to do with J2ME/MIDP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Suggestion

First fix your J2ME runtimes before you attempt to "test" applications. Currently it is more application developers testing J2ME runtimes.

I am specifically talking about Record Stores and UDP sockets.

And the handset makers could offer free updates of the J2ME runtimes which actually fix issues, instead of charging for essentially the same bugs.

Even better, buy a gravestone, inscript it with "hier lies the biggest joke in the histor of programming" and stop putting J2ME runtimes on phones. Only the people visiting the graveyard would notice.

[Paul Hates Handles]

Eh?

Company charges money to do what people usually do themselves? What?

[Gulfie]

J2ME is dead, long live J2ME

But seriously, it's out of date, largely ignored with respect to modern phones and been pretty much completely irrelevent in every business space I've ever worked in, and who would start working on ME applications when two of the biggest current/coming platforms, iOS and Android, simply don't support it?

What's needed right now is a good JavaFX stack with underlying JRE specifically tuned for platforms with limited resources, that is licence-free and ideally also open source. And don't forget the tooling.

[Andy 73]

Here we go again...

With the world and it's dog attempting to charge you for each and every small step towards actually delivering an app to a paying customer, it's hard enough to justify developing for the 'big two', never mind the 'not quite made it'.

Apple demonstrated the blindingly obvious fact that getting products to customers with minimal inconvenience builds a market and boosts the platform immeasurably. Make it easy to buy, make it easy to build and you've got an ecosystem. Yet we still see the old stack squabbling over who comes up with the standards, who charges, who gets what share and who gets to play gatekeeper (answer: they all do!).

There's nothing inherently wrong with Java - but Sun have NEVER understood the 'get it into the hands of the customer' part of the equation (c'mon, Java WebStart is a lame duck, of a family of unipeds). There's no evidence that Oracle are interested in that type of market, or have the skills, so there's a real risk that Java simply becomes ever more marginalised.

I could imagine that eventually, Google will end up owning a 'consumer Java' fork whilst Oracle maintains the enterprise stack. Is that a healthy option, or good for the application ecosystem? Probably not, but there's no will to do better amongst the people who can make the difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

j2me is still king

Its on 77% of smartphones and 62% of feature phones.

It can also run on WinCE, Win Mobile (phoneME), Android (microemulator) and desktop/browser (microemulator).

There is not better solution for business applications for enterprise customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Attempt

...to joking. Enterprises normally use WinCE or BlackBerry. It seems that some switch to the iPhone lately.

J2ME is a cheapo/crappo solution that has a large number of runtimes deployed, but is scarcely used, because - well it is crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

well obviously

... you are not an architect / developer of enterprise applications. On BlackBerry, enterprises develop using what? If you want to have the same code base for both winCE and BlackBerry, j2me is the way to go (provided that j2me fulfills your specs). "cheapo/crappo solution" not really, it requires a fair amount of skill even though its labeled micro edition. A cheapo/crappo developer would produce crap using anything; compact .net, web technologies, Objective-C, ...

I wonder what for example SAP is using for enterprise mobile clients?

Then there is the iPhone; its powerful, stable, user friendly and beautiful but the development is closed to what apple dictates. I'm sure it could have a fast jvm on it. With that hardware it could have a slow jvm on it and the apps (business) would still be fast (except for apps produced by cheapo/crappo developers).

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Experience

..on a Nokia 6030, a Motorola (can't recall model), a Samsung (can't recall model), a Siemens (can't recall model), and a Nokia Symbian phone made me really hate J2ME.

This was 3 years ago, but my guess is it did not get substantially better. Basically, the phone manufacturers could not care less about the quality of their J2ME runtimes. Siemens was totally broke, and everybody else had various major issues. The Symbian phone had the best J2ME runtime.

A friend of mine tried to develop something on the BlackBerry using Java and he was equally horrified. I have to admit I never used WinCE and the iPhone, but I have heard there are lots of serious applications in existence. I can't say that about J2ME.