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I have a lot of respect for James Gosling but claiming that J2ME is more developer friendly than developing for Android is kind of ridiculous. IMO Anyone who ha

by ajju 16y ago

I have a lot of respect for James Gosling but claiming that J2ME is more developer friendly than developing for Android is kind of ridiculous. IMO Anyone who has tried to write apps for pre-Android phones using J2ME and tried Android development would prefer Android any day for both business and ease-of-development reasons.

dman 16y ago
Can you point out where Gosling makes the claim that J2ME is more developer friendly ? From my reading of the article he mentions the fact that J2ME fared poorly on code portability across devices and that android fares even worse. He does not address which is more developer friendly in the article at all. As an aside I do agree with him that Android is more fragmented now than J2ME was back in the day.
- ergo98 16y ago
  >From my reading of the article he mentions the fact that J2ME fared poorly on code portability across devices and that android fares even worse. Well clearly having worse fragmentation would be less developer friendly, would it not? One follows from the other. >As an aside I do agree with him that Android is more fragmented now than J2ME was back in the day. No one who actually developed for Android and J2ME would even dream of saying this. Gosling gets too much of his news from Engadget, I suspect.
  - dman 16y ago
    It might be just me but when someone says developer friendly I imagine theyre talking about a solid api, easy development cycle, good documentation , helpful community. If someone were to talk about one use case thats more broken on one platform vs another I would not parse that as one platform is more developer friendly vs another. Its been sometime since I tried to hack anything on android (i briefly tinkered with it around version 1.6) but here is an example of some cross device breakage that I ran into - http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1480 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1480 .
    - ergo98 16y ago
      That is the poster child of different behaviors -- bring up Android fragmentation, and it's invariably what gets brought up. Sure, it's a problem. It should behave consistently. It's one very, very, very small element of the platform.
      - dman 16y ago
        Having intents without having a mechanism to specify an interface for applications that handle intents is the part that seems broken to me. As I said I have not been following android so I do not know if this has subsequently been addressed.
- ajju 16y ago
  As ergo98 said, fragmentation=lack of portability=non-developer-friendly. Android is far, far better at code portability than J2ME in its (non) hey-day, if for no other reason than that I don't need to have my Android app certified by each handset manufacturer. Furthermore, Google's app certification process is basically generating a private key and signing with it, if you just want people to download your app from your website. It's a little more complex if you want your app to be in the Market, but still simpler than Apple's. I keep reading about the lack of Android portability but the android App I developed for internal use at our company works equally well on a Motorola i1 (iDen, Android 1.6) and a Sprint Evo (4G, Android 2.2)
- davidw 16y ago
  >As an aside I do agree with him that Android is more fragmented now than J2ME was back in the day. Eh? What with MIDP1.0 (which doesn't even have floating point), 2.0, CLDC1.1 and 2.0, plus various JSR's, and, the real killer, serious, often strange incompatibilities between devices (and there are at least an order of magnitude more J2ME devices out there), I'm not really sure how you can make that claim. Fragmentation is certainly a worry for Android, but stating that things are currently worse than with J2ME seems very inaccurate.

by ajju 16y ago

dman 16y ago

Can you point out where Gosling makes the claim that J2ME is more developer friendly ? From my reading of the article he mentions the fact that J2ME fared poorly on code portability across devices and that android fares even worse. He does not address which is more developer friendly in the article at all. As an aside I do agree with him that Android is more fragmented now than J2ME was back in the day.

ergo98 16y ago
>From my reading of the article he mentions the fact that J2ME fared poorly on code portability across devices and that android fares even worse. Well clearly having worse fragmentation would be less developer friendly, would it not? One follows from the other. >As an aside I do agree with him that Android is more fragmented now than J2ME was back in the day. No one who actually developed for Android and J2ME would even dream of saying this. Gosling gets too much of his news from Engadget, I suspect.
- dman 16y ago
  It might be just me but when someone says developer friendly I imagine theyre talking about a solid api, easy development cycle, good documentation , helpful community. If someone were to talk about one use case thats more broken on one platform vs another I would not parse that as one platform is more developer friendly vs another. Its been sometime since I tried to hack anything on android (i briefly tinkered with it around version 1.6) but here is an example of some cross device breakage that I ran into - http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1480 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1480 .
  - ergo98 16y ago
    That is the poster child of different behaviors -- bring up Android fragmentation, and it's invariably what gets brought up. Sure, it's a problem. It should behave consistently. It's one very, very, very small element of the platform.
    - dman 16y ago
      Having intents without having a mechanism to specify an interface for applications that handle intents is the part that seems broken to me. As I said I have not been following android so I do not know if this has subsequently been addressed.
ajju 16y ago
As ergo98 said, fragmentation=lack of portability=non-developer-friendly. Android is far, far better at code portability than J2ME in its (non) hey-day, if for no other reason than that I don't need to have my Android app certified by each handset manufacturer. Furthermore, Google's app certification process is basically generating a private key and signing with it, if you just want people to download your app from your website. It's a little more complex if you want your app to be in the Market, but still simpler than Apple's. I keep reading about the lack of Android portability but the android App I developed for internal use at our company works equally well on a Motorola i1 (iDen, Android 1.6) and a Sprint Evo (4G, Android 2.2)
davidw 16y ago
>As an aside I do agree with him that Android is more fragmented now than J2ME was back in the day. Eh? What with MIDP1.0 (which doesn't even have floating point), 2.0, CLDC1.1 and 2.0, plus various JSR's, and, the real killer, serious, often strange incompatibilities between devices (and there are at least an order of magnitude more J2ME devices out there), I'm not really sure how you can make that claim. Fragmentation is certainly a worry for Android, but stating that things are currently worse than with J2ME seems very inaccurate.