Nostalgia Hits With J2ME Development
Way back in 2003 I got my first cell phone. A Sony Ericsson K700i. It was a cool device that I could do a lot with. But the reason I got it instead of something else was because of J2ME development. It had a lot going that it could do that I wanted to be a part of. Mainly gaming!
It was relatively easy for me to get into. Download the Sun Toolkit then compile a .java file into a .jar and instant app on a phone emulator. The file sizes and dependencies were small which made things a low barrier of entry. Such a simpler time.
So I decided to see how J2ME apps were holding up lately. J2ME emulators on android devices seem to be available and whole websites to download apps and games. But what about development?
Not too much has changed. Looks like Sun changed the name from J2ME to Java ME. The SDK upgraded to 3.0. But there hasn't been much in JSR updates. A few came out in the last 10 years but these are updates to security, communications, and a few multimedia options. I wanted to try and get something going like I was back in 2003-2004.
So I went over to the Sun website, got signed up and downloaded the J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2. I first tried on Linux to use on my Ubuntu machine. I was disappointed to know that all the old dependencies are no longer workable with 64 bit Linux. So I did something that was surefire to work.
I downloaded the windows version of the toolkit and ran it through Wine. This 20 year application should have no problems. That meant I also needed Java for windows to get everything working. So I picked up the Windows installation of the Java Development Kit JDK 1.5.0 Update 22 for windows x86 as well. That installed flawlessly as well.
So now, we have the bare minimum for old school J2ME App Development and I can test compiling the sample applications and running the emulator. Here I am running the Games app on the emulator.
And now I can use VS Code to make edits to the source code.
Learning the code is a little tricky. The documentation online is scattered. You can find some on the wayback machine but I found that old books give a good reference. Some can be found on archive.org
These books will give a good foundation for J2ME app development. You can also find the current JSR documentation online here:
Wont tell you how to use the methods, but will be useful to know what to put in it.
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