It turns out that as The New York Times says, Google is not building a phone. They’ve built (bought, really) a phone platform called Android. It’s Java on Linux, and it’s open source, but notably it is not J2ME based. Reportedly it will run J2ME apps, but the SDK makes the Android API look more like the BlackBerry’s Java API than J2ME. It’s a full featured API that isn’t a least common denominator of all possible mobile devices.
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Category: Linux
J2ME: Write Once, Be Disappointed Everywhere
We developers and other nerdy folk are used to using strange and klunky applications that do something special, and we’re used to that trade-off.
Eclipse is an IDE so it’s hard to imagine it not being baroque and difficult to use, requiring weeks of effort to become productive. JBidWatcher has saved me a lot of money on eBay so I could probably put a dollar value on how much it’s worth to endure its bizarre UI. Azureus is fairly fugly also but it does a very good job and has a deep, sophisticated UI that’s fairly easy to understand, so despite the eyesore, it’s at least fairly clear. The common thread among all of these is that they are all written in Java, and that they are so valuable that it’s worthwhile to overlook the ugly UIs.
Now imagine those sorts of trade-offs, but on already difficult to use mobile devices, and aimed at consumers. Are you making a strategically wise choice by sacrificing usability and control over the user interface, and probably access to platform-specific features such as dialing the phone, in order to save money on development? Adam Breindel talks about this in When Building a Smartphone App, Resist the Siren Song of J2ME.
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Looking forward to LinuxWorld Expo SF 2007
Last year I was doing mobile development and there was interesting Linux-as-smartphone-OS stuff going on. Now I’m doing Ruby on Rails development and there’s interesting server grid stuff going on. Here’s what I’m looking forward to finding out more about (all of these are things I’ve been watching or directly researching already):
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Impressions of Ruby on Rails from an ex J2EE developer (me)
A friend who is working primarily in the J2EE technology world (as I was, until early 2006) asked me for a how’s-it-going with respect to Ruby and Rails.
The short version:
– Ruby is fun to program in, as you’ve probably heard
– Rails is over-hyped, but it’s still quite good (definitely not perfect)
– I like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet by any means
– Ruby performance was bad and is getting less bad, and can even be good if you do what the experts say
– The real gem (har har) in the Ruby and Rails space is the community itself
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GNU Screen and my screenrc
GNU Screen is a remote terminal multiplexer, described welll elsewhere.
I use it to eliminate the too-many-Terminal-windows problem on my laptop. I also use it to help me achieve some level of continuity on remote hosts, by leaving half-completed sysadmin tasks as-is until hours or days later even if I get interrupted or if the task is really long-running and I need to roam around with my laptop.
Today I decided to invest some time in making my command-line development environment launch with a single script. Here are the details.
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