Just when you think that maybe J2ME isn’t all that bad? Another new user account:

I’ve always read people rant about J2ME on the intarwebs but I never really knew why. Now I do. I had to create a J2ME phone application for a class this semester and it was quiet a learning experience. I was very pleased with J2ME and all the capability available in the different JSR’s. The application I made let’s the user query where other people are at, if they also have the application on their phones. It uses SMS messaging between phones, the Location API, XML parsing, and queries a REST service (Yahoo Maps image api). See image below.
Everything worked beautifully on the emulator, but going to the phone, Wow, that was frustrating. Number one is getting all the device permissions correct. Then, I had threading issues because there are about 5 different threads running in my application at any one time. Then when you add in the cryptic or non existant error codes on the phone, I never did get it working. But I think the instructor was pleased so that’s the important part.

Will I ever code another J2ME application? Not if I can help it… One good thing that came from it is I used Netbeans extensively and now I plan to use Netbeans as my primary IDE. I’ll also be looking at it for an RCP project I have in mind.