Road Map to Mobile Programming
What do we do usually during boring lectures or when lectures are off? We play games on our multimedia cell phones. As cell phones are becoming more and more powerful and as number of phone and PDA users are increasing, a new software industry of mobile programming is on rise. Developing new applications for cell phones and converting applications to make them suitable for handheld devices is the main work area in this industry. But this field is not limited to big IT firms, any engineering guy can start studying mobile programming related languages like Java ME or Android and start developing games and applications without of much setup.
In old days of mobile computing, all manufacturers had their own platform for programming. But recently, Sun has come up with some common platform for handheld mobile devices which is now widely accepted by all major phone manufacturers. This is called as MIDP (Mobile Information Device Platform). The phones which support this platform are the ones which are 'java enabled' or 'WAP enabled'. To develop application in this platform, one needs to have JDK with J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) with WTK (Wireless Tool Kit). It can be downloaded from http://java.sun.com. To test our application on our computer, emulators for particular cell phones are available. Emulators are those which gives exact look and feel of a cell phone in which your application is run and from this, you will get to know that is your application performing correctly, does its user interface looking cool and others.These emulators can be downloaded from 'Club Nokia'. emulators for LG and Samsung are available at http://www.dadp.com
Once all these softwares are acquired, you can start writing java class file in any text editor , if you don't have an Eclipse software installed on your machine. This java code follows the same life cycle concept as the java applet, but this particular java code is known as java MIDlet. Once you are done with your java files, you will be able to compile them through Wireless Tool Kit toolbar. Once compiled these files , then you can run your code on any emulators of your choice, provided your code is error and warning free. You will be able to see actually the cell phone and the program running on its screen with full keypad support.
To be able to download your application on your real cell phone, the best possible way is to upload your program on WAP server. Many WAP servers are available for free where you can try this out.
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