Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, Second Edition Ebook

Publisher  Addison-Wesley
Author(s)  Roger Riggs, Antero Taivalsaari, Jim Van Peursem, Jyri Huopaniemi, Mark Patel, Aleksi Uotila, Jim Holliday Editor  
ISBN  0321197984





This book presents the Java A 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) standards that support the development of applications for consumer devices such as mobile phones, two-way pagers, and wireless personal organizers. To create these standards, Sun collaborated with such consumer device companies as Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Research In Motion, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and many others. The result is a highly portable, small-footprint application development environment that brings the unique capabilities of Java technology, including platform independence and enhanced security, to the rapidly growing wireless market. This definitive Java Series guide provides a programmer's introduction to the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition. It presents a general description of wireless technology and an overview of the J2ME platform. In addition, the book details the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) version 1.1 and the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) version 2.0, the standards that define the Java platform features and libraries for wireless, resource-constrained devices.Written by a team of authors that includes the original J2ME technology experts from Sun, Motorola, and Nokia, this book provides a description of the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, as well as practical implementation advice.
The Java A Series is supported, endorsed, and authored by the creators of the Java technology at Sun Microsystems, Inc. It is the official place to go for complete, expert, and definitive information on Java technology. The books in this Series provide the inside information you need to build effective, robust, and portable applications and applets. The Series is an indispensable resource for anyone targeting the Java 2 platform.

User review
JAVA for mobile devices
It is a realy good book for beginner. I like this book.

User review
Excellent but not a programming HOW TO exactly
In short, this an excellent J2ME reference book, but not very good for average programmers. You will be disappointed if you are looking for a run-of-the-mill programmer's recipe book. This is not a software development oriented book.

Look for it only if you need accurate J2ME reference or if you are intested in an overview which goes into detail for implementation aspects, that is, if you need to understand the
underlying support of CLDC/MIDP by a device. This means the average programmer will be disappointed but a software architect will find it quite useful. Make sure you buy the 2nd edition.

The book is written by people who are actually involved in drafting the J2ME specifications.
The text closely follows the CLDC and MIDP 2.0 specifications in every aspect. It can be defined as a summary of the MIDP and CLDC specifications.

By the way other APIs such as CDC, WMA, File API, etc, are not covered by the book.

User review
I want to learn coding not reading,,.
This is NOT the book to learn how to programming in J2ME! You need a great imagination to learn the content of this book, if you have never experienced J2ME before, because it contains little code example. In spite of this, the book contains only 7 compilable code example, all others are code segments -- that is you need to do a lot of tedious coding your self to get it running.

This book should more likely be used as a reference manual by experienced J2ME programmer. The structure of this book is clear, so it is easy to retrieve information. But the authors of this book seems have a tendency to fill pages, as they use `Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition` and `Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition` (and other similar) instead of `J2SE` and `J2ME` through out the book, as if readers can't remember an acronym!

If you are looking for a book for learning `how to program with J2ME` you should not choose this one.


User review
Review of `Programming Wireless Devices with the J2ME`
So I have been programming with J2ME and DOJA for a while on various Japanese Cellphones. The Japanese cellphones that do support the full MIDP/CLDC combination do not yet support the MIDP 2.0 that this book is covering, but I thought it would be a good idea to check out what I might be able to use when they do, and also try and clear up my own confusion about what precisely the CLDC and MIDP actually are.

Having read the book I think I have a better idea of the distinction between CLDC and MIDP, but still don't feel wonderfully sure. The impression I come away with is that the CLDC is about ensuring a basic level of functionality and the MIDP describes a wider range of functionality such as GUIs and Advanced communications features. This would make sense then if the Japanese Docomo Java framework was CLDC and AU/Vodaphone framework was both CLDC and MIDP.

The book itself was reasonably informative as to the new MIDP 2.0 features, and I was interested to see some good code samples for things like the MIDP Game and Multimedia API - however the code samples don't yet appear available for download. I hope they'll be up soon so I can check them out.

Overall I found the book a little difficult to read - it is kind of more of a reference book - I would imagine myself dipping into it to get things I need, rather than reading through it to get an understanding of J2ME. In some ways the book would almost be better as a more condensed reference work. There are a number of good wireless programming tips such as making all communications run in a separate thread to improve user experience, but these are a little thin on the ground and the book is dominated by working through each detail of each of the APIs. I think is an important book to have if you are working against the MIDP2.0 specification, but I don't think I 'd recommend it to a beginner trying to learn J2ME.

I would imagine that successive iterations of this book will lead to major improvements, such as breaking the book into a Reference work, and a J2ME programming tips guide. I think another couple of years of explosive growth in J2ME wireless devices and programmers will make the latter work possible.

User review
Upgrade to MIDP 2 and CLDC 1.1
The market for small devices (cellphones, PDAs, watches,,,.) with computational ability, but much less so than a standard PC or laptop is potentially vast. No one disputes this. Its allure is enhanced by there being no overly dominant player hoovering up over 50% of the profits, like Microsoft and Intel collectively in PCs.

Logically, Sun sees growth here and this book is part of its frenetic rollout. It differs from the first edition because of significant upgrades to the 2 standards its describes. The Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) went from version 1 in 1999 to 1.1 in 2002. It added more features that the book describes in detail. Basically, they give a richer compatibility with standard java (J2SE). The other standard, Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) went from version 1 to 2 in 2002. To developers the key additions were APIs for sound and games. In retrospect, MIDP 1 was indeed primitive, to lack these.

Commercially, the MIDP 2 changes in the book may be more important than the CLDC changes. It means that you can now develop games and other applications using sound, at a high enough level of abstraction that they can be run on a broader range of hardware. Well at least that is the idea. I have not done so. But the book's explanation seems logical and thorough enough to make this plausible. Undoubtedly, if you and others follow this path, gaps or insufficiency will be found, leading to the next increments of the standards.

If you are still clutching the first edition of this book, or any other book that only covers CLDC 1 or MIDP 1, then drop it. Obsolete. Upgrade here.