Alston Grove

I read the book

Java Development on PDAs
by Daryl Wilding-McBride and it’s very good. It covers J2ME on both PalmOS and PocketPC devices.

My company is doing a “Mobility Blitz” initiative where we go around town presenting and demoing J2ME, compact dot-NET, and SOA technologies. So I’m doing the J2ME presentation and demo. My demo is a MIDP application (aka MIDlet) that I run on both a Tungsten C Palm device and a mobile phone. The MIDlet uses the
kSOAP implementation of SOAP to hit a web service across the network which accesses data in a
Hypersonic Database. I run the MIDlet in the phone emulator on the screen and walk around the room with the Palm device connected over WiFi. The demo is called “SalesForce” because it lets our sales people look up consultants and projects. They can even reserve a consultant who is about to become available. Here are some screen shots:

The compact dot-NET demo is really nice too. They use the “electronic ink” handwriting recognition built-in to the TabletPC platform. But the feature they have that makes me most jealous is their remote display control. It lets them display the PocketPC device on the screen so you can see what they are doing on the device. The guy walks around the room with an iPAQ connected to WiFi and you can see what he sees. I tried to find something similar for PalmOS, like maybe a VNC server (there is a VNC client actually), but nothing like that seems to exist. Perhaps PalmOS with its PIM heritage makes it too difficult to pull a hack like that.

[Updated 12/08/04: Source code can be downloaded
here. If I remember, I developed with Sun's Wireless Toolkit, then ran into memory problems using their MIDP4Palm on the actual device. I switched to IBM's Websphere Studio Device Developer to build and run it on a Tungsten with their J9 VM. Some of the stuff I coded is probably handled better in the new MIDP APIs (I remember using threads to update an on-screen status and timeout network connections).]

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2004 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.