Sony Ericsson's new Virtual Lab enables testing of phone apps through your browser

fiercewireless.com

2 pointsjsjenkins1683 comments

I've been offering this service for Hecl for something like a year:

http://builder.hecl.org/

This is cool. So you turn your simple Hecl scripts into Java ME code? Do you use Sun's reference WTK for the emulation?

Supposedly the deal with Sony's new service is it uses the ACTUAL phone hardware connected to actual networks to test on. You must reserve timeslots or something like that, but then when you are testing (via the browser), you are seeing what is running on the actual hardware on a real wireless network. And you will soon be able to test on phones not yet released too.

But the deal is it costs money.. And I'm not sure how much. Might be too expensive for a small startup.

The emulator I use is an open source one (linked to from the site).

Obviously, they're providing something that is more specific to their hardware, but the general concept is certainly not that difficult.

Hecl is an interpreter, so I don't really need to turn it into anything, just wedge it into a .jar file that the emulator can digest.

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