In the last months I have being busy building a application for the iPhone using the offical Apple iPhone SDK.
I think this new plataform and the bussiness model associated is one step in the right direction. It still has some issues, like the impossibility to create background applications, but is way ahead of what have available in the Java ME plataform. You can check some tip and tricks in this sister site iPhone Adventures.
Meanwhile because i was assigned a Mac to create applications for the iPhone, I decided to try to develop for MIDP using the Mac OSx. My first idea was to replicate my Windows developing enviroment using Eclipse and EclipseME plug-in, after I had all these installed I had my first (big) surprise, the Sun-WTK isn’t available for Mac OSx, then I also discovered that the NetBeans mobility version isn’t available, becouse is mobile module is based on the Sun WTK SDK.
After some googling around i found an alternative, MicroEmulator, is an open source LGPL Java implementation of J2ME in J2SE. The problem is that it doesn’t implement all the libraries the WTK supports, so you need to add some extra libraries to have full compability with WTK. Check out the ones below:
- BlueCove , a open source Bluetooth JSR-82 implementation
- OpenLApi, a open source Location JSR-179 implementation.
I also found out that Eclipse Me was adopted as the official tool for mobile development in Eclipse, you can check out the new features being developed here and download a RC version in here. I tested it with my projects and it works great.
Update:
After some more trials i discovered that my setup wasn’t 100 percent, i couldn’t built jar/jad packages because I didn’t have a working preverifier. After some more googling around i found the solution for this:
- Download the Sun WTK for Linux, install it in some folder in your machine.
- Rename the folder /wtklib/Linux to /wtklib/Mac
- Donwload and install MPowerPlayer SDK. The official page is crashed but you can use this direct link.
- Install the MPowerPlayer and go inside the folder osx/preverify and copy the file preverify to you WTK folder inside the bin folder ( it’s a good idea to backup the existing file).
- After this you can configure you EclipseME/MJT to use the WTK folder. This way you can build your project and create the packages.
- To emulate the application you will use the MicroEmulator, just create a run configuration and specify this emulator.
See you soon
