> What I didnt like is this redefiniton of concepts like events etc. I > wonder why they keep reinventing the wheel. Which also makes me wonder > why Android why not just improve J2ME.
I have wondered the same thing since all my experience to date is with J2ME on industrial embedded systems (not phone aps). Phone apps use PhoneME which is much more restricted than the embedded Java systems we use. We must have access to the hardware, file system, low level event and interrupt access, etc to support I/O devices which vary from application to application. What strikes me is that phoneME is stuck in the past, whereas Android assumes some current hardware base. phoneME lets you run one app at a time with strong sandbox restrictions, no data sharing, no built in database, and you need a dozen JSRs to support everything (ref the high end Sony phones like K850 which still has no keyboard, dinky screen, no touch support). It's a painful environment in which to make something useful. Plus if you want to license phoneME you must shell out around US$100K to Sun for a full JME license. You can't just get part for less (say you just want the Squawk VM to build SunSPOTS). It's all or nothing. So clearly Sun does not want every small company in the world deploying JME commercially. Check out the headache Bug Labs had with that. I blogged a bit about this: http://techbleat.blogspot.com/2009/07/using-small-java-commercially-bring.html. So it is fascinating that Eric Schmidt (once the manager of Java development at Sun!) chose to NOT license JME from Sun (http:// techbleat.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-happened-to-love.html) but to roll Dalvik instead. I can see why Google chose to step into the present instead of suffering with limits that made sense 10+ years ago... still, it's a valid question, and a real shame that Sun could not work together with Google, IBM, and others to make Squawk or JME much more like what Android is now. Perhaps that is part of why they got snapped up by Oracle at a bargain-basement price, and why my Sun stock is worth 10% of what I paid. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
