Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: extended menu bar, current target device, direct input mode, Mobile Media, Wireless Messaging, Sony Ericsson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

<p><i>Pro J2ME Polish: Open Source Wireless Java Tools Suite</i> is written for wireless and other mobile Java programmers who want to "polish" their efficiency and acquire in-depth knowledge about programming real-world J2ME applications. It also uncovers all common device limitations and quirks, and explains how these can be circumvented.</p>

<p>The book describes the Open Source tools collection, "J2ME Polish," and shows how the tools can be used for creating professional J2ME applications. Building multiple devices and multiple locales is easy after studying this book. Author Robert Virkus offers tips about the more hidden features of J2ME Polish, like the logging framework, the preprocessor, and the game-engine. You will learn to polish up your applications with the powerful GUI that enables you to design standard J2ME applications with simple CSS text files. You'll also learn to write portable, fast applications while using all available features on your target devices simultaneously.</p>

About the Author

Robert Virkus is the technical and managing architect and programmer for the open source project J2ME Polish. He is an internationally recognized J2ME expert and is a member of Mobile Solutions Group, Bremen, Germany.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 472 pages
• Publisher: Apress (July 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590595033
• ISBN-13: 978-1590595039
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #810,566 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The only book to get for J2ME Polish., September 13, 2005

By	Mark Spritzler (Long Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When you first learn J2ME, you learn about this fantasy world where all devices follow the J2ME specification to a tee. But in the real world, because of the interpretive nature of the specifications, no two devices really implement the specification exactly the same. So this requires either targeting a particular device or have many versions of you app to run on different devices.

Man what a pain. But that is where J2ME Polish comes to the rescue. J2ME Polish provides pre-compiler directives to allow you to write code such that J2ME Polish's build script can automatically create different versions for you on the fly however you want. There is a lot more to J2ME Polish than just that, but this is a book review.

So let's get to that review. Well, first Robert Virkus is J2ME Polish, well he is the architect and lead programmer for J2ME Polish. Who better to write a book about it? Consider this book the hard copy of the manual for J2ME Polish. If you are going to use J2ME Polish, then this book is a must. It is the reference book that you will need to find anything you need to know about J2ME Polish.

Now, it isn't really a read all the way through the book and you can be J2ME Polish expert. You really need to be actually using J2ME Polish at the time, to better grasp what is being explained. The book can be hard to understand, not because of the writing, but because J2ME Polish is feature rich and there is lots to learn.

I highly recommend using J2ME Polish and buying this book if you will be developing for more than one device, and also to get their cool looking GUI screens, rather than MIDP 2.0 High Level GUIs.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't get this book -- it's a complicated waste ot time and code, November 26, 2007

By	Short Dog - See all my reviews

I'm a serious J2ME developer. I bought this book because it claimed to solve the 600 phone problem. It also promised to do some fancy GUI which are otherwise completely lacking in J2ME.

However, right out of the box the first demo, the menu sample, fails utterly. Ant crashed because I didn't put an Ant jar file in the any classpath then the menu sample didn't work. I had to search some forum to find there is a bug in the latest RC4 download. Apparently no one at Enough caught or fixed it. To fix it I had to patch a css file deep inside the project. If that wasn't enough the actual menu demo looked horrible on WTK 2.5. Couldn't see the menu highlights and it scrolled incorrectly.

Then I tried the roadrunner game. But the game didn't fit on the screen properly--isn't this the 600 phone issue? Ultimately, when I tried to exit, the game (or emulator) crashed. I looked at the jar file size and it was a whopping 462 KB on just 1,433 lines of source! Unreal.

I tried the tabbing demo which looked decent and worked well enough but it was 430 KB on just 200 lines of source. This is awful.

J2ME Polish depends on Ant and preprocessing of #ifdefs which were recognized a bad idea when C introduced them 30 years ago. C++ introduced const (and Java, final) partly for this reason. Actually, in J2ME Polish (and NetBeans) they're not #ifdefs but //#ifdefs because Java never bothered, and rightly, with this silliness--and here they are back again. They make the code less readable and they're virtually impossible to debug.

Then there's this matter of integration of the IDE (I use Eclipse) and Ant. I mean, why bother with an IDE if you must still use Ant? Throw in some .css files, too, for good measure. I just don't get it.

Indeed, I'm returning the book for a refund. I had enough from Enough.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MUST HAVE for J2ME Developers !!!!, August 19, 2005

By	Milosz Weckowski (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I searched for something like that so long. The tool is definetely already state of the art to enable Developers producing professionell applications under the J2ME Plattform. This book supplement the already existing and good documentation and explains everything from higher perspective.

Very Well done !