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Is J2ME going to be big?

 
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Hi Guys,

It's your lazy bartender again. Well, we're wrapping up HF Servlets, and we're deciding what books to tackle next. We would really love to do HF SCMAD, but we also gotta eat! (So far, all the J2ME books out there don't sell very well.)

It seems like for several years everyone's been saying: J2ME is just about to take off and get HUGE! And so far it hasn't... bummer. I kind of thought that when a solid Java phone dropped down to maybe $150-$200 J2ME might take off. Well, although I'm not totally current, I'm thinking that that phone isn't out there yet.

So, the real question is...

Do you guys think J2ME is going to take off any time soon? If so, why? Do you have any compelling stories or facts? Man, oh man, we'd love it if J2ME got big!

-Bert
 
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Hi Bert,


I think the main thing holding back J2ME is the variety of platforms and the current necessity to use native solutions for some parts of apps - RMS, multimedia, etc.

The day we have several popular mobile devices implementng the specs ( wonderful specs!!) that we studied for the SCMAD is the day J2ME does a vertical take off :-)

I'm waiting anxiously for that day 'cos I really like the mobile arena for programming. I just haven't seen the chance to move in commercially yet.
[ June 13, 2004: Message edited by: Terence Doyle ]
 
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Hi Bert!
I think J2ME has a great future! Here, in Brazil, I was invited to take part in a J2ME project, I'm so excited about this project... Unfortunately, the mobile phones here are so expensive... I think that the cost of the phones is the main factor of the "long waiting" for the great "J2ME BOOM" here... The mobile phone companies here don't help too...
Particularly, in Brazil the SuperWaba (a technology to develop Palm apps) had a great acceptance from the developers of mobile applications, breaking the increase rate of J2ME...
This is the scene that I feel here... It's like a tic-tac bomb that will blow very soon....

Guys, please comment about your countries!

Bye
 
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I'm from Singapore. 2 years ago, Sun together the telcos here held the first Wireless Java Jam, focusing on J2ME. They had industry players coming in to conduct talks, telcos looking at possible killer applications, etc. We thought it was going to be our life-line.

But it seems that things didn't work out so fine. IMHO, I felt that the telcos were too focus on their bottomline. Profits were on the top priority. Not much efforts were done to promote the use of a Java enabled phone. As mentioned, the mobile phones were costly, even if they're cheap, you had to sign a contract which is rather expensive.

In the market here, entertainment seems to be the only use for J2ME. Games rule. No business applications at all. Technical constraints are a major problem. The screen on the mobile phone is too small, its too slow to use the number pads to email. You cannot really view attachments. Memory size limitation is another hurdle to cross.

Perhaps when the 3G network kicks off & gets popular, things would change drastically in favor of J2ME. Otherwise, for now, it seems to be a nice-to-have rather than must-have choice.

Just my 2cents
 
Greenhorn
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Hi Guys,

I know some good J2ME programmers that have made a little money. The J2ME book editors!!! All possibilities about J2ME are amazing but in a comercial/financial use they haven�t blown up yet.

In Brazil some opportunities have been offered but I haven�t seen it in use yet. Only GAMES !!!

How terrible is to type in cell phones !!! Do you think your mother, father, grandmother, ... like to type in a cell phone and would trust in a J2me application ?
 
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In India its the same J2me rules the Gaming Market But thats it Only for cellphone based games.
I dont see any movement towards J2ME based applications.
 
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Well, the thing about J2ME is: It is not enough to have "J2ME skill" alone. For games, you would need strong skills for story telling and art work. (I have heard that the development cost of a J2ME 3-D game can easily exceed half a million dollars -- very sophisticated business.) For enterprise applications, J2ME is part of the infrastructure and requires the developer to have knowledge about the entire system.

Even for technical skills, I have consistently heard from recruiters that it is hard to find good developers for the "real" J2ME projects -- the candidate needs a lot of experience working with the 100+ different Java phones and dozens of carriers and also understand messaging/WAP etc. People with this skill set is very hard to find.

Second, the adoption of J2ME in the enterprise space is not really slow when you look at the diffusion curves for other technologies in an economic depression -- it was just hyped too much in the past 2 years. I expect it will continue to be hyped in this year's JavaOne. Just look at all those mobile companies that sponsor JavaOne.

But despite the progresses we have made in the past two years. J2ME is facing steep competition from other wireless technologies. The .Net Compact Framework is wildly successful on PocketPC based mobile enterprise applications with hundreds of large enterprise apps deployed today. J2ME also competes with Symbian C++ on the popular Symbian smart phones (although all of them support J2ME as well) and from BREW on CDMA phones (although Nokia CDMA phones also support J2ME). I wish Sun and JCP will keep up with the competition. Otherwise, when the wireless revolution finally arrives, J2ME might not be relevant anymore!

In the past 6 months, I have been seen many companies seriously evaluating their mobile strategies as the economy improves. They have not decided whether they will choose J2ME or other technologies and are certainly still months away from hiring real developers. But the intention is there -- wireless is clearly the future, whether J2ME succeeds or not.
[ June 14, 2004: Message edited by: Michael Yuan ]
 
Bert Bates
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Michael and Everyone -

Thanks for the feedback! More! More!

Michael, I agree that it's only a matter of time... the big question is when?
 
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Adding to Michael's point about .net

I have found it extremely easy to create a mobile application using .net for PocketPC. the PocketPC, though has the big advantage of having a file system and can have a large chunk of memory for storage. For instance, I can put an Access .MDB database onto the PocketPC and store my data and access it identically to how I would code for a decktop application.

In J2ME, you cannot do this. You can create some usable enterprise applications, but for the most part those are simply lookup applications that calls a Web Service to retrieve the data to display.

As far as more complex applications, the limitations of J2ME hold it back.

I tried to develop a Purchasing mini system on a J2ME device, but I needed to store about 8000 record 100 bytes product table.

Mark
 
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Hi Bert,

I do hope you will consider to pubish HF SCMAD, as the HF series is very very good! I just passed SCBCD today with 95%, and the only material I read is HF EJB.

ALthough I had passed SCMAD, I do wish to have a better understanding on SCMAD.

Nick
 
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.NET is horrible.
But PocketPC and Smartphone are not steady.
If MS make PocketPC and Smartphone themself, like XBOX, their products may be perfect, but they will still pay tuition fee.
Because MS is software company. Mobile is hardware, not CD-ROM.
 
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For J2ME to succeed in the applications segment there is also a need to have an improved version of IDE (http://eclipseme.sourceforge.net/), so that applications with J2ME and J2EE will be developed with some code generation mechanism, and the time to build,test,deploy will come down.
 
Mark Spritzler
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".NET is horrible."

If you say so.

Mark
 
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If it is going to be big I certainly should study for and take the SCMAD exam, also is there any book designed specifically for SCMAD coming out ?
 
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I build embedded device using Linux for living. I know for sure the embedded OS and/or software is a huge market. There is no reason why J2ME cannot be used as a good embedded device OS. I think the problems are as follows:
- Lack of education on the J2ME, period. Most people think J2ME is just for Mobile phone. This is not 100% accurate.
- J2ME is inefficient and not suitable for the embedded device. Again, this is not 100% correct either.
Because of the misconception and weak marketing on J2ME to the management, project won't get approved to use J2ME. This is totally unfair to J2ME. Therefore, I have no doubt whatsoever that a HF book on J2ME would drive the grass root effort. There are tons of Java developers out there to support this.

Regards,
Joseph Kwok
 
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Hi Nicholas Cheung,

Iam planning to write the SCBCD exam.Nicholas How long it took for you to prepare for the exam???.Is one month is enough ???.

Regards,
Vasanth
 
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Originally posted by Joseph Kwok:
I build embedded device using Linux for living. I know for sure the embedded OS and/or software is a huge market. There is no reason why J2ME cannot be used as a good embedded device OS. I think the problems are as follows:
- Lack of education on the J2ME, period. Most people think J2ME is just for Mobile phone. This is not 100% accurate.
- J2ME is inefficient and not suitable for the embedded device. Again, this is not 100% correct either.
Because of the misconception and weak marketing on J2ME to the management, project won't get approved to use J2ME. This is totally unfair to J2ME. Therefore, I have no doubt whatsoever that a HF book on J2ME would drive the grass root effort. There are tons of Java developers out there to support this.

Regards,
Joseph Kwok



Yes, Joseph you're right. Actually Canon is on the way....

It uses J2ME platform for developing Embedded Applications on the MultiFunctional Devices like Copier/Scanners.
 
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Hi Bert,

Here in Brazil the Siemens and Nokia are betting high in Mobile ,
they mounted research centers here, and there are anothers
spreaded in the world.

In www.zdnet.com there is a graphic of IT priorities
(at the first page) where wired & wireless figures as the
first priority in the business in the near and long term.

There�s also in this site a interesting video "Geting the most out of mobile devices".
 
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So bert, have you decided to go on with "HF SCMAD"?
 
Chengwei Lee
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Would definitely be interesting to read a HF J2ME book
 
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If the (lack of) popularity of this week's promotion can be based on traffic in this forum, then it doesn't seem that many folks are very interested in the SCMAD certification.
 
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I think folks will become more interested in SCMAD as time goes on. The mobile application craze hasn't quite struck around the US yet as it has in other parts of the world, so as it does, the demand for SCMAD will increase.

Just a matter of being slightly ahead of the wave, for once.
 
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Is J2ME going to be big



Yes, more and more application has been developed for M2M(machine to machine or machine to human) based on J2ME technology, besides mobile phone application.

However, personally, just J2ME wouldn't complete the whole puzzle, we need J2EE to complement it. Java is EVERYWHERE!

winston lim.
 
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Two weeks ago, we had a the biggest nation java event in Brazil, JUST JAVA,
and there was a nokia�s keynote, Java is everywhere at Nokia, announced (is it the correct verb??) by Petteri Bergius, TP Technology Marketing
and Sales for Nokia.
He showed us many statistics and said that bear in mind that the market isn�t only Brazil but the world.

But, IMHO, as long as mobiles be so expensive, it will not get a big slice from brazilian�s market.

Regards
 
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I live in Dallas Texas. In the past 6 months I have seen about 6 jobs requiring J2ME as valid skill set rather than just a buzz word on a job description. As many in this thread I think that it will eventually take off, but business's need to find a valid reason for using it rather than it's the cool technology .

I think that developers are defintely chomping at the bit to use it, but the business case of using it is what is lacking.


Chris Gastin :roll:
SCJP 1.4
SCWCD 1.3
 
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Mmm... Some of the reasons why there are less people interested in SCMAD is the lack of study guides, lack of exam simulators(Of course WhizLabs SCMAD is the first exam simulator in the world) and smaller job market, compared to J2EE.

But as time goes on, more and more of above will be coming up and people will get more interested in that for sure...
 
Billy Tsai
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I believe it will be big, recently there is a young person thats 28years sold the mobilephone J2ME he and his own team created to a japanese company for around $6.6 million USD. His team only has 8ppl .
 
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Originally posted by Bert Bates:
Hi Guys,

It's your lazy bartender again. Well, we're wrapping up HF Servlets, and we're deciding what books to tackle next. We would really love to do HF SCMAD, but we also gotta eat! (So far, all the J2ME books out there don't sell very well.)

It seems like for several years everyone's been saying: J2ME is just about to take off and get HUGE! And so far it hasn't... bummer. I kind of thought that when a solid Java phone dropped down to maybe $150-$200 J2ME might take off. Well, although I'm not totally current, I'm thinking that that phone isn't out there yet.

So, the real question is...

Do you guys think J2ME is going to take off any time soon? If so, why? Do you have any compelling stories or facts? Man, oh man, we'd love it if J2ME got big!

-Bert



I have been studying J2ME for a while now. It is the default environment for the Handheld/Ubiquitous computing class at my university. Also, for my Master's Project I developed four chapters of a J2ME lab manual covering the Game API. As someone that has been studying this topic and shopping for J2ME books I can tell you one thing for sure:

The biggest reason that J2ME books don't sell is because they are awful!!!

There are two major problems with the dozens of J2ME books currently on the market:

1) Almost all of them cover MIDP 1.0, even though MIDP 2.0 has been available for a couple of years now.
2) Most of them don't give any more information than I could get by simply reading the API documentation.

The books currently available simply DO NOT delve into the details. Why would I (or anyone else) waste $30 to $50 on a book when I can get the same information from the sun website?

Later, Frank
 
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Most people will think that getting a SCMAD is a waste of money, as the J2ME is a small subset of the J2SE platform. To boost up J2ME, there should be more people that are willing to be SCMAD certified, in that way, there will be a larger pool of "proven" developers for J2ME. That will the resources formed for J2ME applications. To encourage more people to take the certification, I guess the best way is to lower the price of the SCMAD certification exam.

With the proliferation of SCMAD certified developers, people and company with great ideas will be more willing to develop J2ME applications (other than games).
 
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J2ME is certainly BIG|HUGE in Asia as well as in Europe. It seems not in North America.
 
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J2ME is certainly BIG|HUGE in Asia as well as in Europe. It seems not in North America.



That is very encouraging! It will be nice if there is more detail, like news or web site link.
 
Roseanne Zhang
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Here is one:
http://www.cnjm.net/cgi-bin/lbcjm/forums.cgi?forum=10

The forums name is "China Cellphone Java Network"
The forum is "News"
The 6th line is "运营商掘宝手机游戏 无限�钱途�引人竞折腰"
in English
"Busyness found treasure in cellphone games, infinite future as well as money makes you bow!"
 
Roseanne Zhang
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Another bad example, we made a cellphone game, it is not published yet. However, we found it is played in a Europe cellphone chatroom already. Oh, my god, the hackers!
 
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