Jatin my mentee at techTribe, asked a question :
"can u tell me about the scope that j2me has in the industry?"
This blog entry attempts to answer the above query.
First J2ME has been re-branded as Java ME. So is J2EE as Java EE, and yes you guessed it J2SE is now Java SE.
Now that you have fallen in love with Java, (I fell for it when it was in beta circa 1997, and now happily married to it, though I have a mistress called C# :), after the initial infatuation stage, you will need to evaluate the career options.
First Java ME is heavily fragmented and most of the manufacturers support is as an afterthought. All these manufacturers have an alternate C++ SDK and their own custom options.
Nokia and Moto are two 400 pound gorillas in the mobile arena. Though these two support Java ME, they have their alternative SDK. Any real life application would have to use their SDK and be tied down to their platform. Moreover Sun has launched Java FX recently, which is targeted towards RIA (Rich Internet Application). Though Java FX is a layer over Java SE and ME, it does puts spanner in the Java ME's gears. talking about gears, it reminds me of Google..why? check out Google gears but that's another story and lets not digress.
Java ME has serious competition from RIA see Google API and apps for mobiles. Also Microsoft have been slowly and steadily been chipping away at the mobile OS market.
So Java ME is in its way out to join the Applet club (Going to Caribbean into the Dead Man's Chest, with apologies to the Pirates trilogy)
Lets understand why Java ME is going under. First, Google is leading a gang of RIA developers, the advantage of delivering an XHTML application with AJAX, is that most mobiles have a good Internet connectivity. Also distribution and lifecycle management is much easier. RIA apps can also remain offline and sync when network catches up, this is done by leveraging the cache technology.
The Microsoft's mobile OS initiative is more serious, since they have more at stake than Sun in this space.
That's because after Jonathan Schwartz took over, he buried the hatchet with Microsoft. So, no more mindless Gate's bashing. Also he re-focused Sun's strategy and Sun is now making ALL its software open source! So how does Sun makes money? Good question and answering it will answer your query as well.
Sun makes its money by selling high end servers, and that is not the dual core types but more like 128 cores :) Check out Sun Blackbox as an example. Sun is also very good at making apps runs faster on their Solaris and extreme hardware platforms. For example, I have a patent (owned by Sun), to make Java faster than 'C'. So Sun really does not make money on simple hand-held devices, but by selling high end servers.
Given that Java EE has a mobile extension for RIA (Ajax, xHTML) its more of interest to Sun if applications are delivered from servers than embedded inside mobile devices.
Thus if you are wanting to go for Java, go for Java EE not ME. Sun is more focused on EE.
Now when I read the Nokia's tag line "This has what computers have become", Sun's Blackbox comes to my mind and not Nokia's N series.
I hope I have answered your query.
