I just noticed that I did not post one topic about mobile development with J2ME, and that although
my
thesis was all about J2ME, location-based services and mobile client <-> server interaction.
So since
I'm going to attend a course about mobile services in this semester and I'm currently configuring my machine for that,
I thought it may be helpful to document this (for me and for others) here. Below there are some steps that illustrate
the components needed to get started.
- Download and install (extract) the Eclipse IDE (classic version)
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
- Download and install the Sun Wireless Toolkit (WTK):
http://java.sun.com/products/sjwtoolkit/download.html
- Install the required Eclipse plugins for basic development
SVN Subclipse main site: http://subclipse.tigris.org/
SVN
update site (v1.4): http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x
- Install the MTJ (Mobile Tools for Java - former EclipseME) plugin for
developing mobile applications using Eclipse
http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/
Installation
via update site (recommended): http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/updates/0.9/stable/
If you see these entries (as above) when creating a new project you
should have installed everything. But before actually creating a new Midlet project go to the preferences of Eclipse
and link the previously installed Wireless Toolkit as shown in the image below.
One
last "best practice" suggestion when developing with Eclipse. The best to do is to once download the latest Eclipse
distro, install the basic plugins you always need during programming (i.e. SVN, see step 3 above) and zip that Eclipse
directory. So whenever you're going to develop a new project, take that zip copy and extract it to your desired
location and then install the needed plugins specific for the kind of development you're going to do. For instance when
you're going to develop J2ME, create one Eclipse installation with all the J2ME plugins in it and use just that eclipse
installation for programming J2ME.
What's the advantage? Well, you have one installation per "topic" and so when
you finish your project, you can zip that installation and pack it into your project folder. So when you come back
after a year or so and you'd like to run the project again you have everything in place and you don't have to fight
around with version conflicts etc.
Questions? Thoughts? Hit me up
on Twitter
