CS457/546 J2ME Programming Information

CS457/546 - J2ME Programming Information

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To begin with, you will need a copy of the JDK, which can be downloaded here if you do not already have it. Most tools appear to prefer a 1.5 version of the JDK, but a 1.6 version could work as well.

Before going further, you need a wireless toolkit of some kind. This will provide an emulator, tools, documentation, sample code, and other useful items for your development. More often than not, toolkits should be installed before other development tools, but will likely need to have the JDK installed first.
It is recommended that you use Sun's Wireless Toolkit. It is stable, full featured, and comes with lots of documentation. Another possibility is Nokia's S60 Platform SDK. The 3rd Edition, FP 1 version is specifically designed for the N95 devices we will be using in this course. However, this toolkit has some issues, particularly in our lab environments, and so it is not recommended. It can be installed along side Sun's toolkit, but you might encounter issues if you tried to use it for your assignments.

With a wireless toolkit installed, you now need to select a Java IDE to use. (Sun's toolkit, however, can be used on its own, if you'd rather go that route.) For our purposes, we recommend using NetBeans and the NetBeans Mobility Pack, installed in that order.
You can also use Eclipse as your IDE, along with EclipseME to interface with the mobility side. We found however, that NetBeans was a little more usable and more stable for our purposes, and did not require tweaking or much in the way of configuration to work. (We would also have needed to upgrade Eclipse in our labs to use EclipseME, which apparently could have broken dependencies and requirements for other courses. So, NetBeans was the safer route that way.)

If you are feeling particularly adventurous, you can try to set up your development environment under Linux. (The above assumes you are using Windows.) In theory, this is possible; the only part above without a Linux counterpart is the Nokia platform SDK. If you go this route, we wish you the best of luck!