Poliplus Software took the ME4SE project, which makes Java 2 Micro Edition APIs such as the LCDUI classes and the Generic Connection Framework available for the Java 2 Standard Edition, and created ME4Android:

Since the Android SDK came out last week, I’ve been toying with the idea of porting ME4SE into Android as to make it as easy as possible to port over current JavaME code. With ME4Android, I wanted the porting to be done automatically so no lines of JavaME code would need to be modified but only the build scripts, so targeting Android would only require a rebuild of current JavaME code.

On my first pass at ME4Android, I used our rather large JavaME app called FlyerApp as the test app. This code is done completely on top of
Canvas so it only uses JavaME’s low level user interface libraries. The code uses a few threads, supports animations and does networking.
I figured if ME4Android can run FlyerApp, it will be able to run a lot of Java games too.

In the process of getting FlyerApp to run on Android, I came up with a lot of roadblocks, some architectural and some bugs that
I intend on submitting to Google once there is a formal way of submitting bugs on Android.

To see the exact same (i.e. identical) app run on Blackberry and JavaME phones (Samsung A920/A900, SonyEricsson K790, Motorola V3xx, and others) click here. On this page you can see screen shots and also download the .jar and .cod files.

Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community at Sun,believes Apple’s plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early-2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.

Really? It seems like there are many barriers here:

• Will the iPhone SDK be rich enough to allow you to embed Java
• What are the licensing issues around embedding a mobile Java onto the iPhone
• If this is done by the community, how will it actually bootstrap onto the device itself? Would we see apps that require you to download 20 MB of Java first?
• I don’t think people want Java ME on the iPhone. They may want to be able to build rich iPhone applications using Java, but they would want full APIs to the iPhone device itself. Could you imagine NOT supporting touch gestures etc?

So, although I think someone in the community may go ahead and do this, I don’t know if it will become a way for people to developer the killer iPhone apps unless Apple gets behind it. What do you think?