Book Description
In the past five years, Sun has collaborated with major consumer device manufacturers and other companies to create a highly portable, secure, small-footprint Java application development environment for resource-constrained, wireless consumer devices such as cellular telephones, two-way pagers, and personal organizers. This work started with the development of a new, small-footprint Java virtual machine called the K Virtual Machine (KVM). Two Java Community Process (JCP) standardization efforts, Connected, Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP), were then carried out to standardize the Java libraries and the associated Java language and virtual machine features across a wide variety of consumer devices. The first round of the CLDC and MIDP standardization efforts took place during the fall of 1999 and spring of 2000. Twenty-four companies participated in the CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 1.0 standardization efforts directly, and more than five hundred companies and individuals participated indirectly by sending feedback while the standardization efforts were in progress. Major consumer device companies such as Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Palm Computing, Research In Motion (RIM), and Siemens played a key role in these efforts. After their first release, the CLDC 1.0 and MIDP 1.0 standards have become very popular. The deployment of real-world, Java-enabled wireless devices began in 2000, and the deployments accelerated rapidly in 2001 and 2002, approaching exponential growth. It has been estimated that over 50 million devices supporting the CLDC and MIDP standards were shipped in 2002, and the number is likely to be at least twice as large in 2003. As a result of the widespread acceptance of these standards, major business opportunities are now emerging for Java application developers in the wireless device space. The second round of the CLDC and MIDP standardization efforts was started in the fall of 2001. The goal of the CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 efforts was to expand on the success of the original standards, refine the existing feature set, and introduce additional APIs, while keeping a close eye on the strict memory limitations that still constrain the design of wireless devices. More than 60 companies were directly involved in the development of the CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 specifications, reflecting the broad acceptance and adoption of these standards in the wireless industry. This book intends to make the results of the standardization work in the wireless Java technology area available to the wider software development community. At the high level, this book combines two Java Community Process Specifications, CLDC 1.1 (JSR 139) and MIDP 2.0 (JSR 118), and presents them as a single monograph in a way that the corresponding Java Community Process (JCP) Specifications cannot accomplish by themselves. We have added a general introduction to the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME ), provided more background material, and included a number of small applications to illustrate the use of CLDC and MIDP in the real world. We also provide some guidelines and instructions for getting started with Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition
