Welcome Yu Feng, "Wireless Java Programming with J2ME" author!

[Mark Herschberg]

Hello everyone. This week, we have Yu Feng joining us as we talk about all the excitement of J2ME. Yu Feng is the author of this weeks book giveaway, "Wireless Java Programming with J2ME."
Unfortunately, I'm away at JavaOne, so won't be too active in the discussions myself, but look forward to reading the discussion when I get back.
Welcome Yu Feng!
Your friendly bartender,
Mark

[Yu Feng]

Thanks Mark for the introduction.
I will be around this board to answer J2ME questions.
-yu

[Dennis Nicks]

Hello Yu,
I'll break the ice with a non-technical question. I got interested in Java because of its promise on limited computing devices. It seems that J2ME has had a very slow start. I did a job search for J2ME and there't not much out there. Why do you think its taken so long to ramp up, and do you see this picking up soon?

[Priya RamMohan]

Sir,

Can a MIDP profile be used to develop a full fledged palmOS
application.
Thanks

[Nizan Horsefield]

Hello Yu
Just book your book from Amazon.co.uk waiting tentively for delivery!
To Dennis,
Yes J2ME has had a slow start, but Nokia has just commited themselves to providing 'Java Phones' by 2002. J2ME has only been out about 6 months! I have been watching J2ME over the last 6 months and things are starting to move quickly, so get going with the coding. You wait for the JavaTV API to catch hold!!!
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Nizan Horsefield
Sys Eng Internet Services
Citibank

[Yu Feng]

Dennis,
The job market is extremely slow in general, IT managers are cutting back on their spending especially in the emerging technologies. J2ME is still new, it will take some time for it to mature so that big companies can take full advantage of it.
However, there are already quite a few startup companies moving full speed ahead with J2ME. And with the committment from wireless vendors like Motorola, Nokia, NTT Docomo, etc. J2ME has very bright future.
-yu

[Yu Feng]

Priya,
The answer is yes or no, depends on what you mean by full fledged Palm applications.
MID profile is desinged for wireless cell phones and pagers which have limited display and keypad. The gui APIs in MIDP are fairly simple, good enough for cell phones but may not be good enough for Palm. But MIDP for Palm is available today. You can get the early access version from
http://java.sun.com/products/midp/palmOS.html

The PDA profile is designed for taking full advantage of Palm devices, which have more memory, storage, faster CPU, and big display, etc. But it is not available today. I think it is probably going to be released sometime this year. But I am not quite sure.
-yu

[Yu Feng]

Nizan, thanks for your interest in my book, you can download all the source code from http://www.webyu.com.
-yu

[mrtuba]

Knowing the job market is slow, how much will having the Java/PDA developing skillset help on a job hunt? In other words, are there significantly more contract opportunities available for PDA programmers than for those who know just Applets/Servlets?
This topic interests me, but I want to know what career value it can have.
Thanks for your help.

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Tom McComb

[Nizan Horsefield]

Tom
No-one can 100% guarantee that there will be work out there in any particular area. What I can say is that there is a very big commitment by many of the large players in the mobile phone and PDA areans to Java. Nokia will release there Java phones next year, Motorola have already released the i85 phone that is Java enabled, Borland have the J2ME as a standard add-on to JBuilder 5. The communications industry is moving towards wireless data tranfers and applications on held devices, J2ME is a very strong player in this field. All we have to do is make sure that we have enough experince in this API, which may be difficult as it has only been out for 6 months.
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Nizan Horsefield
Sys Eng Internet Services
Citibank

[Mark Herschberg]

"mrtuba",
The Java Ranch has thousands of visitors every week, many with surprisingly similar names. To avoid confusion we have a naming convention, described at http://www.javaranch.com/name.jsp . We require names to have at least two words, separated by a space, and strongly recommend that you use your full real name. Please log in again with a new name which meets the requirements.
Thanks.

Your friendly bartender,
Mark

[Tom McComb]

Thanks for your assistance. My apologies for not following the policy.

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Tom McComb