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Hitchin' A Ride

Posted by editor on September 27, 2005 at 7:10 AM PDT

Make your media mobile

Mobile phones have a wide variety of media capabilities -- something that's both exciting and challenging to the programmer who wants to use them. It's great to potentially have MP3 playback, a capture device like a camera, or video on board. On the other hand, it's a huge hassle if you intend to deploy your MIDlet across a wide variety of devices, all with differing levels of support for media. You don't want to show buttons or other GUI elements that encourage the user to attempt to use features that won't actually work.

Fortunately, the Mobile Media API (MMAPI) makes it fairly straightforward for a MIDLet to interrogate the device it's running on and determine what media capabilities are present.

In the Feature Article, J2ME Tutorial, Part 4: Multimedia and MIDP 2.0, Vikram Goyal continues his J2ME series with an introduction to MMAPI. He shows how to play audio and video on the small device, in cases where they're supported, and also shows how to deal with threading issues that can occur when large media data is downloaded over a potentially slow connection.

In today's Forums,
kirillcool replies to a post that says contributing to Mustang "is nothing for a community. It is only for Sun": In
Re: More reasons, he writes:
"Nothing for a community? How about a new feature / fixed bug that was added to JDK as the direct result of the contribution? Or are you expecting a paycheck for fixing the bug? Will you get one working on Harmony? Your name is in the code, on the bugfix, just not in the copyright section. Is your ego really that big?"

jseltzer writes of
The successful developer:
"I've learned one thing about successful developers. They aren't necessarily the smartest. They're the quickest to make decisions. Indecision is a killer to the development process. Successful developer's find the shortcut solutions. They don't reinvent the wheel. They copy. They finish on time and the managers love them for it."

Tom White talks up MapReduce in today's Weblogs:
"MapReduce is an amazing distributed system for massive data processing from Google Labs. There's now a Java implementation."

Simon Brown checks in with news of The Java Posse podcast:
"After I wrote about the JavaCast being discontinued, Dick Wall got in contact to tell me about a new Java podcast that he was putting together."

Kathy Walrath is
Now Hiring:
"The client group in Java SE-land is looking for someone smart enough to automate themselves out of a good job -- and into an even better one."

In Also in
Java Today,
with tongue very much in cheek, The Spuddy Show debuts as a Flash-animated, Daily Show with Jon Stewart-like take on recent Java events. The first episode satirizes Sun's anti-Dell ad campaign, recent Java conferences in China, and even borrows from Artima's interview with Gavin King for some biting humor at the expense of Hibernate, the JCP, and JBoss.

The page-reload cycle presents one of the biggest usability obstacles in Web application development and is a serious challenge for Java developers. In Ajax for Java developers: Build dynamic Java applications, author Philip McCarthy introduces a groundbreaking approach to creating dynamic Web application experiences. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a programming technique that lets you combine Java technologies, XML, and JavaScript for Java-based Web applications that break the page-reload paradigm.

In Projects and
Communities,
the new JXTA Community project Peermi describes itself as "an extension of the standard RMI classes to enable true peer-to-peer, bi-directional RMI. Peermi includes a universal (Internet-wide) lookup system like the RMI registry and classes to facilitate multicast method calls."

java.net and the Robotics, JDDAC and Embedded Communities will be participating in RoboNexus. This conference, held October 6-9 in San Jose, CA, is technically oriented with seminars for and by the world's leading robotics professionals and manufacturers.

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Make your media mobile

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