Why is everything to do with J2ME so hard?

Over the last few months we’ve spent a lot of time developing a mobile application. it’s been a great learning experience that I haven’t really blogged about that much (for various reasons). Now we’re getting closer to the point of launch I thought I’d outline some of the things we’ve been up to and the problems we’ve encountered. I imagine each of these will be the subject of their own blog entry when I have a little more time.

Collaborative working
Since this has been an extra curricular project (we all have real jobs too). We haven’t ever worked in the same place or the same time.

Infrastructure
Since everything has been run off my poor little Linux box I’ve been responsible for setting up and looking after the infrastructure. This includes subversion, ant, wtk, automated builds, OTA deployment, J2ME signing, obfuscation and a blog.

Setting up a company
I didn’t have a huge amount of involvement with this but it was interesting to see the various steps required to set up a company.

J2ME
The part that inspired this blog (I went a little off my original topic). It’s an amazingly immature environment to develop in. There is virtually no documentation about some really important areas (signing springs to mind). The emulators are variable to say the least. Debugging is tricky and the APIs are obscure. Only today I discovered that if your build number goes above 99 (i.e. 1.0.100) the jar will refuse to install on the phone with the message invalid file. Of course it works fine in the emulators (even the proper Nokia ones based on actual phones)

It’s been a lot of work to get to the point we’re at now but it’s been enjoyable. Better get thinking about the next project!