J2ME in a Nutshell

Chapter 9. J2ME Programming Environments

Java developers who worked with the JDK 1.0 and 1.1 no doubt recall how much time it took for the first production quality integrated development environments to come to market. Most developers at that time had little choice but to create their code with their favorite editor and compile it using the command-line tools included with the JDK.^[28] Debugging was even more of a nightmare, because the only tool available, jdb, was low-powered and not very robust. In the last few years, and especially since the release of the Java 2 platform, J2SE IDEs have matured to the point that you can now place your trust in them for routine development tasks. Most of them even have wizards that build JAR files for you or extract your Javadoc documentation.

Happily for J2ME developers, it has not been necessary to wait such a long time for reasonable development software to appear. Sun has made available the J2ME Wireless Toolkit, which can be used alone or integrated into some of the leading IDEs on the market. Several cell phone manufacturers provide their own development environments, which can be used to develop and test MIDlets on their devices. This chapter looks in some detail at the J2ME Wireless Toolkit and at Forte for Java, which provides a seamless environment for developing MIDlet suites, based on its ability to be tightly integrated with the Wireless Toolkit. The chapter also lists some other third-party IDEs that provide support for J2ME, ...