Vikram Goyal's Blog

June 2005 Archives

I wish I was at JavaOne!

Ok, so the title of this post says it all. I wish I was at JavaOne.

There is an absolute smorgasbord of presentations that I would want to attend. My interests are in, as you may guess, in J2ME and this years JavaOne is chock-a-block full of interesting appetizers, entrées and main meals.

The next best thing to being there? Nothing really. I am on the other side of world (down under actually) and can only imagine how good it would be to actually attend it in person.

Dream on.

Create mobile applications with drag and drop

I am a little ambivalent about using the new mobility pack from Netbeans. The visual mobile designer for creating MIDlets is an interesting concept and looks darn good. But my hesitation stems from my previous forays with drag and drop visual editors for creating desktop applications and I dislike the amount of extra code that these editors put in. You know the ones, where the comments include a warning “Do not modify this code in the code editor”!

The Visual Mobile Designer for MIDlets seems to do just that. Several pieces of linking code that come with the dreaded warning. It is a good option for small, simple MIDlets, but for larger projects you seem to lose the flexibility.

I think I will be sticking with the code editor for now. But hats off to the Netbeans developers for an aesthetically pleasing and innovative idea.

JSR 209 - Bringing Swing to a mobile near you

I recently noticed JSR 209 that promises to migrate Swing UI set to MIDlets, amongst other things. The API is in public review and the last date for the review is 18th July 2005.

Personally, I don’t think I will use it. It seems to me to be a huge package which doesn’t add much in terms of functionality. MIDlet UI’s need to be simple and effective and making them Swing enabled is well, tad unnecessary.

How will Swing scale to MIDlet size proportions? I don't know. Rather than working on migrating Swing to MIDlets, it might have been better to enhance the LCDUI.

Of course, Swing is only part of the package. The rest of the package covers Java 2D Graphics, Image I/O and Input Method framework, and these may be useful in their own right.

Javamasters finalists announced

The finalists in Javamasters 2005 were announced yesterday. There are two categories, Student and Business. A team of experts from Sun and Siemens narrowed the entries to the top 10 in each category.

You now have the chance to pick this years winner in each category. There are some fantastic prizes up for grabs just for voting. Voting ends on July 15th. Vote now!

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