Day: April 16, 2004

Here is a collection of links that summarizes what has piqued my interest in the J2ME arena in the past few weeks.

• Location Based Services
  • JSR 179: Location API for J2ME
  • The JSR 179 Specification at Forum Nokia
  • J2ME and Location-Based Services article by Quasay Mahmoud gives a quick overview of basic API usage.
  • Sue Spielman and Tom Whitehill: Java and GIS: Mobile LBS (part one, part two)
  • Java Location Services tracks Java LBS articles
• Wireless Messaing API
  • The WMA Spec
  • Extend J2ME to Wireless Messaging by Soma Ghosh
  • See also a chapter in the first book referenced below
• Crypto
  • The Legion of the Bouncy Castle is a lightweight crypto library that they have shaved down to fit with MIDP development.  If you obfusticate before loading your app, you can considerably whack the size of the bouncy castle files needed.
  • Encrypt data within mobile apps is a tutorial at IBM developerWorks.
  • Securing wireless J2ME is an article at developerWorks.  It’s older, but a lot of concepts still apply.
• XML
  • kXML 1.x at enhydra.org
  • kXML2 is your best bet for XML pull parsing in J2ME
  • kSOAP, kSOAP2, kXML-RPC, adn kUDDI for your mobile web services needs
  • JSR-172 (J2ME Web Services) will rock when it shows up on devices some day.
• Libraries
  • Via Chris Davies, JZlib is a pure Java zlib re-implementation.  A J2ME version is available.
• Books
  • Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (Second Edition): Don’t judge a book by its cover.  Inside this boring facade is a lot of information.  The book tears apart and analyzes the Smart Ticket app, gives lots of good advice, and shows advanced examples of the Mobile Messaging API and in general just rocks.
  • Wireless Java: Developing with J2ME (Second Edition): Very useful but it spends a good chunk of space talking about game development, which is very important in MIDP 2.0, but not my cup of tea.
  • Enterprise J2ME: Developing Mobile Java Applications: this one is light on general MIDP 2.0 hacking, but deals extensively with hooking J2ME apps into the corporate backend.  If that’s what you want to do, this book is for you.
  • Bluetooth for Java: if you want to play with Bluetooth and you have a mobile phone that supports JSR-82, you want this book.  The source code for it is very useful.