How is Sun's Wireless dev. kit ( Beta ) Compared with iDEN of Motorola ?

[shailesh sonavadekar]

SUN has come up with the latest release of Wireless Developement Kit ( Beta )? How is that compared with Motorola's iDEN kit ? what are the advantages & disadvantages ?

[Eric Giguere]

Sun's kit is basically just the reference implementations of the CLDC + MIDP wrapped together into a very simple development environment, plus it includes a plugin for Forte. It helps you get your projects started. The iDEN SDK is a MIDP implementation for Motorola phones. It integrates tightly with CodeWarrior. Which one you use depends entirely on what you want to do.... if you want to target Motorola phones you're better off using the Motorola SDK to start with. Or if you like CodeWarrior, use the Motorola SDK. If you're a Forte fan or you don't have a favorite IDE, try the Sun SDK.
Eric

[shailesh sonavadekar]

thanks , eric once again. once , you are there for help. You have mentioned , Sun has wrapped CLDC + MIDP ( midlets ) in simple environment. If i am not wrong , with KVM , spotlet class is associated. Is midlet improvemnt over that ? Or something very different.

[Eric Giguere]

The spotlet classes that are in the CLDC reference implementation are unsupported classes that will never be developed further. The CLDC is not really meant to be a standalone runtime environment, you're supposed to use a profile built on top of the CLDC, like the MIDP. The profiles are the ones that provide user interface classes. MIDlets are in some sense a little like applets but they use their own UI model and classes. A PDA profile is being developed for Palm and other similar devices that will have an AWT-like UI.
Eric

[shailesh sonavadekar]

Eric , thanks for reply. i think this has become chat room for us. one thing i want to ask. you have mentioned that spotlet are not going to be developed. but , currently if i have not mistaken , there is no pda format developed. so palm pilots have to use kvm only ( cldc ) for java programs to run of the palm pilots. what they use now ? am i wrong ? please clarify my doubts ? I think they may be little silly.

[Eric Giguere]

That is correct, for the Palm right now the only choice is the Palm port of the CLDC. Just be aware of this, and be prepared to rewrite your code -- unless you use the kAWT classes, because the new PDA Profile is going to include a subset of AWT. But it's not clear to me if you can even license the CLDC for distribution right now anyhow....
Eric

[shailesh sonavadekar]

one more querry ? what do you mean by " be ready to rewrite the code ? "

[Eric Giguere]

The "com.sun.kjava" classes will all disappear, so you'll have to rewrite any code that depended on them.
Eric