"For more than five years, Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) and its predecessors, such as PersonalJava, have served as the only viable platforms for developing managed smart clients on mobile or embedded devices. But that will soon change. With the introduction of Visual Studio .Net (VS.Net) 2003 in the first half of 2003, Microsoft will make its managed environment, .Net, available on Windows-powered mobile devices with its new product, the .Net Compact Framework (.Net CF)."
"Due to the requirements of uniform and powerful mobile devices, .Net Compact Framework is suitable for cash rich customers with controlled mobile environments. It was initially focused on the enterprise mobile market, especially for Microsoft-centric IT shops, while J2ME was originally active in the consumer sector. However, in the long run, most experts expect both platforms to coexist in all market sectors. As developers, we must choose the right tools and make them all work in heterogeneous environments. For example, we need to make J2ME clients work with .Net backend servers and vice versa. In this article, I walk through an end-to-end mobile GIS (geographic information system) application that mixes Java and .Net on client, server, and middleware layers. However, before we can dive into the sample application's technical aspects, we need to step back and look at the business aspects critical to our architecture design."
"As Java developers, we are well suited to enter this profitable new industry sector because the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) is emerging as one of the most widely supported mobile gaming platforms. In this article, I discuss the opportunities and challenges of mobile gaming from a Java developer's perspective. I also survey state-of-the-art mobile Java technology through important J2ME specifications."
"In performance-hungry games, 90 percent of a program's execution time is spent running 10 percent of the code. It is in this 10 percent of the code that we should concentrate all of our optimization efforts. We locate that 10 percent using a profiler. To turn on the Profiler Utility in the J2ME Wireless Toolkit, select the Preferences item from the Edit menu. This will bring up the Preferences window. Select the Monitoring tab, check the box marked "Enable Profiling", and click the OK button. Nothing will happen. That's okay - we need to run our program in the emulator and then exit before the Profiler window appears. Do that now."
"Although C++ has the advantage of being compiled into native code with direct access to system resources, and with BREW the platform provides end-to-end solutions to mobile game developers while allowing them to work with any desired language (including C++, Java, XML, and Flash), Java is the most popular choice for game development. Java, or the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform to be precise, is identified as the most convenient for developing mobile games. (For more specifics on J2ME, see "What is Java 2 Micro Edition?") The driving forces behind J2ME's popularity are:"
