The Java ME nonsense story | Hacker News Reader

The Java ME nonsense story

quirksmode.org

38 pointsthisisblurry13 comments

I think Java ME's so far in the grave it's not worth beating up on it at this point. Sure, it is still widely deployed on feature phones, but it is not the future.

That may be true, but the article is actually about the misreporting in market share graphs of Opera Mini as Java ME.

Right, but my point is: who cares? I mean, it's nice to point it out, but it's nothing to get that worked up about. It's not like we're going to be seeing ads along the lines of "Hey, I heard Java ME's making a comeback!" ( see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEnTxzQ5LTI )

I started of in mobile in J2ME and am not looking back, you would want a sizeable portion of the market to even consider switching from the Android/iOS SDKs unless you also have a passion for self harm.

Even something as simple as signing and certification is a massive headache as theres no standardisation of what root certificates are in devices. The UTi and Java Verfied (Java Verfried as we called it) came very close but its still not 100%

No one really upgraded the firmware in their devices and the Java machine could not be updated, when fragmentation issues were solved, it was painful but some useful lessons were learned I guess!

In my (limited) experience, it's fairly difficult to find J2ME devices which are easy to get code on- most cheap feature phones use proprietary cables and software for data transfer. If anybody can prove me wrong, please do. As a hobbyist, a dirt-cheap commodity Java platform would neat to have.

It's fairly easy: run a webserver and upload the jad/jar to it. Host a page linking to the jad. Visit page from phone, and select that link.

The downside is you pay for the data on your cell plan.

Alternatively blasting the jar at the device over bluetooth is also likely to work.

I had an older nokia phone that i could do that with over bluetooth, but it would usually fail to recognize the certificates unless put on to it by the nokia software rather than standard obex.

Most of cheap nokias are fairly easy to do so, they come with a common micro usb port and that is all.

If you want my advice get an old JP8 Sony, so something like the K850, fast Java machine that only has some issues with optional apis and you can provision just the JAR via its USB cable or Bluetooth really easily. If you do get something running you can be semi confident it runs on the other JP8s

I think the more interesting stat from that report is the huge lead that iOS has over Android in terms of web use, it seems really strange given Android's explosive growth.

Here again I suspect they are only counting the default Android browser and not all the alternatives, although the iPad might also be a factor.

no not strange given iPad's rise compared to iphone and android phones...so far devices to counter that are Samsung Galaxy Tab and Kindlefire with a future nexus table mid 2012.

It's not strange at all. They don't measure device units with their stats. They measure "time spent in the browser". Considering an iPad is used a lot more for web browsing than a phone, whether it's iPhone or Android, it dramatically skews the results in favor of "iOS". Plus, they measure stock Android browser usage. And many Android users don't even use the stock browser.

But the main point is they don't measure device units, so if you're looking for that, don't look at browser stats, especially not the ones from Net Marketshare. They've always been misleading like that. They've even added the iOS browser numbers to desktop Safari numbers once and said "Safari had much higher growth than Chrome" - which is just silly.

If you want device numbers, just listen to what the companies themselves are saying. The last numbers from Apple for all iOS devices were 250 million, and 200 million Android devices. Clearly the Net Marketshare stats don't show that at all. They show iOS being 3x bigger, which is very misleading, and what's upsetting is that they actually bank on it.

I suspect many "free with contract" Android phones are only used as dumb phones.

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