Developing for mobiles and handheld devices has never been easy.But starting mobile development from J2ME is one of the best option available.This is because of the ubiquity of Java enabled phones in the market, although there are several competitors in the market like android,windows mobile platform,iOS,blackberry OS etc but still J2ME is the best place to start with.So i'm gonna show you how to setup J2ME development environment and what are the tools that are best suited. There are two ways to setup the environment.
1.) The easier way
2.) The tougher way
Easier Way
Install Net-beans all version and you are done. All the required tools are installed by default. This method is most suited to Linux users ,although windows users can also install it and can make their life easier.
Note: While downloading the net-beans file do not forget to change you operating system from the drop down list on the downloads page.
Tougher Way
Manually installing the required tools.
Step1:
Installing JDK (Java Development Kit)
JDK is required prior to the installation of J2ME WTK.
The current version while writing this post was JDK 7u3. Download the package suited for your operating system and install it.
Step2:
Installing Java WTK (Wireless Tool Kit)
This is the main tool which you need to start J2ME development. Goto the link and download Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5.2_01 and install it.
Step3:
Installing ECLIPSE IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
This is an optional step. If you don't need a dedicated IDE you can use a text editor to create your program,any ASCII editor will work, but my favorite is Notepad++ and you can start creating wonderful apps. The only overhead if you choose not to install Eclipse that you need to switch to WTK window to create,open and compile any project ,but anyway you can go with it if you love to take some pain while programming.
So let us see how to install Eclipse IDE. You can download Eclipse IDE form here. Don't get confused by seeing so many options to download eclipse,the right version for you is the classical version. After downloading and installing the right version of eclipse you need to download and install EclipseME 0.7 plugin for eclipse for J2ME coding. You can follow the installation instruction here.
BINGO you are done!!!
There is one more small application that you might be interested to install. It is Pro Guard 2.1,it is a utility which compress the jar files by removing unused classes from it.
Now you can start the J2ME programming and can start developing apps for mobiles.
