Two days ago Google launched its new web browser, called Google Chrome. Quickly lots of people downloaded it to have a try and see how it worked. After some testing time I can say that it does run fast. With high probability, the reason is the new browser engine it uses, launching each website and tab like a new process and in a smart and easy way.

But after testing it I thought “Ok but, will Google provide a Chrome version for mobile devices?”. And surprisingly I got an answer from Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, who talked about this in an interview at the Chrome launch event. In the event he said that Chrome will make its way to Android, the company’s mobile phone operating system and software suite.

Brin also said that both Android and Chrome have been developed separately but that now the two projects are public and nearing their first final releases, it’s probably that Android’s browser “is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack”, pointing to JavaScript improvements as one area. Chrome and Android’s current browser both already employ WebKit, an open-source project for the process of interpreting the HTML code that makes up a Web page and rendering it on a screen, what makes them get closer.

With this on-working state browser and the current mobile browsers, we start to have the chance to choose a web browser for our mobile device, although in some cases it depends on the O.S. our device has. Below you can find a little table with the current mobile web browsers, the O.S. they support and the development state.

I wish all these browsers were cross platform and then we could forget about our device O.S. and choose the one we like most even if we change our phone.

Via MobileCrunch

When it comes to develop Java ME applications, every developer knows how problematic is to provide a consistent user expierence accross a set of different devices. Each manufacturer has different implementations of the standard.

On Sun’s words, “Due to implementation differences in fonts, layout, menus, etc. the same application may look and behave very differently on different devices. In addition much of the advanced UI functionality is not accessible in LCDUI and requires the developer to write very low level ‘paint’ type code.”

Very clear.

For overcoming this annoyance, many developers implement their own UI code or make use of some UI frameworks like J2ME Polish. We have talked about it.

Now, Sun comes to rescue with Lightweight UI Toolkit, promising “look and behave the same on all devices using a programming paradigm similar to Swing”. This is what all we were waiting for.

The toolkit includes not only UI controls, but other advanced theming, transitions, animations, etc.

By now, only what they name “early access library binaries” are available with a Sun License Agreement (SLA), what enables using the library for free in commercial applications. Source code will be soon available with a GPLv2 license.

Will this UI Toolkit become a de facto standard for solving – at least, helping to solve – fragmentation in JME?

I have not tested it yet, but this enters number one in my to-do list.

Via MobilePhoneDevelopment
Link LightweightUIToolkit

In the previous post of this series, we talked about out motivations for using J2ME Polish and some issues about licensing. Now we are going to look at all the features included in the J2ME Polish bundle, as it is actually a whole collection of different tools for MIDP developers.

The tools range from standard build tools for compiling, preverifying and packaging the applications to a sophisticated optional GUI which can be designed with simple CSS textfiles. These are the tools included:

BuildTools/ J2ME Polish Task
The core components of the framework are those allowing preprocessing, resource assembling, localization, compilation, preverification, obfucation and packaging of J2ME applications. All this building process is based on Ant, by including its own customizable task. This is the de-facto standard for Java and supported by the most common IDEs. The core idea is that you can optimize your application for multiple devices and languages/locales by using a unique build.xml file. J2ME Polish can also invoke any emulators for you.

Device Database
An XML-based device database provides a convenient and portable way for adjusting your application to different devices. Thanks to the powerful preprocessing capabilities you can use this database directly in your application or your build.xml file. All the devices are arranged by vendor, family. This way you can target at a same time all devices from certain vendor or certain line-up, such as Nokia or NSeries.

Automatic Resource Assembling
All resources like images and sound files are assembled automatically for you depending on the specific target for the build. You can use specific resources for vendors like Nokia or for devices which support a specific format easily. You can even include resources only when some conditions are met. For example, for including MIDIsoundfiles only when the target device does not support MP3 but supports the MIDI format.

Logging Framework
This can be used to enable or disable logging levels for classes or complete packages just by modifying some settings in the central build.xml. Log messages can be shown on real devices as well, by simply using System.out.println(). Of course you can disable all logging completely, so that no traces are left in the application.

Localization
It’s easy to create localized applications – just provide the translations and other locale specific resources and J2ME Polish will embed them into the application. In contrast to all other solutions, localized applications do not have an overhead compared with nonlocalized applications, since the translations are actually integrated on the sourcecode level.

GUI
J2ME Polish allows using the standard MIDP/1.0 as well as MIDP/2.0 widgets in your program and design them with simple CSS directives like those used in web development. Designers can now design the application independently of programmers. As J2ME Polish includes implementation for those standard widgets you can even use MIDP/2.0 widgets on MIDP/1.0 phones.

Moreover, for allowing J2ME Polish GUI capabilities in your legacy MIDP applications you do not need to change a line of source code. Just include the proper configurations setting in the build.xml file and you will get all the power of CSS design.

The GUI framework includes a game engine implementation, that allows to use the same API for MIDP/2.0 and MIDP/1.0.

Utilities
J2ME Polish includes some often used components that are available in Java but not in the MIDP specification. This includes support for generics, ArrayList, MathUtil, HashMap, image managing, classes for managing bitmap fonts,…

Standalone Tools
Some standalone tools are bundled into the pack. The binary data editor can be used for editing any structured binary data file. Another pretty useful tool is the bitmap font editor, which can be used for creating bitmap fonts out of any True Type fonts.

IDEs support
Thanks to its Ant-based build, J2ME Polish includes plugings for both NetBeans and Eclipse, the most popular IDEs in Java world.

Well… you see J2ME Polish really bundles a lot of stuff, and of course, you can extend the framework and use your own widgets, add your own preprocessor, or integrate your own obfuscator in a relative simple way.

Link J2ME Polish

When we started developing our firsts JME projects, we had to deal with “the UI issue”. This is none other than when to make use of native JME UI or to develop a custom UI from basic drawing primitives.

Both options have its pros and cons, and if you are about to make such a decision, maybe this post, where Simon Judge recently made good considerations about this issue, could help you.

The fact is that we wanted to provide our users with a richer UI experience than native JME does today. Then, we have two options: developing our own UI framework, or… leveraging an existing one. And we decided to use J2ME Polish.

J2ME Polish is an open source project developed by Enough Software, a company based in Bremen, Germany and founded by the end of 2004. J2ME Polish is distributed under the GNU General Public License as well as commercial licenses. This way, when the source code of your mobile applications should not be published under the GNU GPL license – that is the usual case for many ISVs -, you can use one of the commercial licenses.

But J2ME is not only a GUI framework. It is an application framework where the set of functionality includes, besides GUI-related stuff, other things such as serialization, persistence, logging, localization, a game engine,…

We will cover some of this stuff in successive more in-depth posts.

Link J2MEPolish