My current point of view on J2ME

I received an email from Piero Campanelli, he was asking me what I think on the J2ME world, what are the opportunities and so on.
At the moment I’m not developing anything on J2ME but I can say that I have a strong experience, this website is called Java2Me.org, online since 2002 and more or less I’ve one full year of experience of development and design with this Java technology.

I said to him that I’ve raised a white flag on J2ME.
I spent more than 6 months on the development of a client that was used for two years in a row at the Java Conference in Milano and in many others gigs.
I’ve spent a lot of passion and work on that. I’ve received feedbacks from the people.
My aim was to develop an “universal” client, running more or less on any device.
We were testing it on a quite big number of devices.
Then at the conference I sow people coming and saying that is not so nice on this or that device, with problems of installation, problems of the layout of the gui.
Problems problems problems always, but the effort to make it universal was big, confide in me.
Some people also telling me, why not a wap page instead of this?
I don’t have to install anything and more or less the graphics is the same.
Yes my GUI was not so nice. This decision was taken to handle the biggest number of phones possible.
I’m not a graphic designer, that’s true.
But then if we want to have a cool universal client we should call also a good graphic designer, let’s have him for 1 month and let’s add also a graphic programmer, for, let’s say three months.
After this experience I had an interview with a cool big company working on the mobile, summer of 2006.
I told them that I don’t believe anymore on J2ME, that I prefer to write a cool Xhtml Mobile web page, maybe with some, limited Ajax inside. They say no, you’re wrong, and they showed me a cool, very cool, incredible nice application wich was using DRM, Mp3, audio streaming. Incredible application.
Unfortunately it was targeted for one only single device.
I’m not a game programmer but I know that the games are developed device centric.

So what’s my conclusion?
If you wanna develop an enterprise service for a mobile phone let’s think on the new opportunities with the limited Ajax on mobile.
If you have money and resources to spend let’s develop a device specific MIDlet, nice looking and powerful.
Think on the mobile phone as a laptop: we don’t develop anymore applets there, but a lot of web applications, if the phone is always closer to a laptop does it make sense to write MIDlets today?

That’s my opinion at the moment, looking forward to read here some good comment from the J2ME community.