[OSM-talk] Mobile countryside surveying tool

Kai Krueger kakrueger at gmail.com
Wed Sep 30 15:20:09 BST 2009


John Smith wrote:
> 2009/9/30 Nick Whitelegg <Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk>:
> 
>> Target platform would be any device supporting JavaME.
> 
> Why JavaME exactly?

Well, perhaps because it is by far the most wide spread mobile 
programming language?!

It is only really Apple with the iPhone who once again decided to be 
incompatible with everyone else (and admittedly now Android too). Pretty 
much every other phone including windows Mobile phones and Blackberry 
have some support for JavaME although the quality of the JVM widley 
varies.

> 
> It's kind of getting long in the tooth compared to JVMs running on
> modern smart phones....

Yes, it has its issues, no doubt, and so it is good to see some 
evolution in this space, but JavaME pretty much remains the only option 
if you don't won't to rewrite large parts of your code for each 
available phone. It is by now also a fairly capable language that is 
perfectly suitable for applications like these. The mayor issue really 
is the stupid security modell and DRM stuff but that is not that much 
better elsewhere either.

> 
> Not to mention smart phones usually have a soft or hard keyboard,
> rather than twiddling about with 12 keys to type things out....

Actually, you can do all that perfectly fine with JavaME. It has support 
for full keyboards and touch screen handling.

Kai

> 
> 





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