Russell Beattie

Matt Croydon is playing with J2ME and has two great tips:

The J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.0 seems to have taken a lot of headaches out of J2ME development. I messed around with the Wireless Toolkit 1.x a few months ago, but didn't get much further than the basic demo.

I really like that I don't have to drop to the command line in order to build or deploy. I don't have to write a jad in a text editor, it's generated for me. All of the basic properties are easily accessable.

Of course, if I were working on a project in a production situation, I would probably use Antenna, a collection of ant tasks for Ant 1.5.x that allows you to build, preverify, create JADs, and do all the other stuff that all the cool kids are doing. It's released under the LGPL.

I'll definately have to look into this. I was running through the Wireless Toolkit demo this afternoon and ran into a little problem while trying to run the app with Over The Air (OTA) from an Apache web server:

OTA Error Code (37) - The server did not hava a resource with the correct type (code 406) or the JAD downloaded has the wrong media type. [text/plain]

Of course, the solution is to add a few lines to an .htaccess file in the deployment directory:

addtype application/java-archive jar
addtype text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor jad

Now the demo works fine. I can download it to the emulator and run it. Lots of fun!

I just checked and sure enough my OrionServer didn't have J2ME MIME types added yet! Cool beans, thanks for the heads up, Matt.

Now I've got to get off my ass and start developing.

-Russ