Finally - the guys in Wireless Toolkit group released a beta version of WTK emulator. This version is a reference implementation of MSA - JSR 248, so it comes with many cool APIs, like Location API (JSR 179), Scalable 2D Graphics (SVG - JSR 226), or Advanced Multimedia Supplements (sound and image effects - JSR 234).

You can download the beta version of the emulator from java.sun.com page, install it and plug it into NetBeans with Mobility Pack installed using Java Platform Manager from Tools menu. When set-up, simply choose WTK 2.5 as your platform emulator and start developing code for those new APIs :-).

Although not a brand new news, last mont Microsoft released the Standalone Device Emulator, which emulates real ARM based Pocket PC system. This is great news, because there is no longer need to have installed Visual Studio to be able to use the emulator :-). You can download the emulator from microsoft page: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C62D54A5-183A-4A1E-A7E2-CC500ED1F19A&displaylang=en . They also released beta version of their next version of the emulator, which will be included in the next version of Visual Studio, as a Community Test Preview. You can download the preview from this page: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=13F5DE85-30CD-4506-9C5B-A2068FA1EE9E&displaylang=en . Finally on the following page you can find all the links above and some other useful information concerning the emulators: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/downloads/Emulator/default.aspx

Now why I'm writing this to my blog? Let me think ... did I secretly started to work for Microsoft? No :-) - you can actually use the emulator to run Java ME CDC version of JVM for Pocket PC and use NetBeans Mobility Pack for CDC start developing Java application for this platform, as I wrote some time ago in this blog entry. Furthermore if you would like to develop rather Java SE applications for PocketPC, you can try out open source VM for Pocket PC called Mysaifu JVM.

I haven't written any blog entry for some time now - the reason is simple, preparing for JavaOne/NetBeans Day, NetBeans day and JavaOne itself and 14 days vacation after JavaOne kept me busy for some time. But from the beginning - as most of you already know, JavaOne was quite success for NetBeans and NetBeans Mobility Pack this year. On Monday I was doing demo at NetBeans Day how easily can one develop Swing applications for SavaJe phone using Matisse GUI builder, on Wednesday together with Tom Brandalik from Sun Java Wireless Toolkit team I had one technical session (TS-4589 - Good Morning, Buenos Dias, Dobry den Mobile Internationalization in Action), on Friday I was doing instructor-led hands-on-lab Mobile Applications: Visualize it, Build it, Deploy it to Many Devices. The most important event for me though was a demo on James Gosling's keynote on Friday, where Petr Suchomel and me showed how Java can be used to track RFID tagged items and how one can use a mobile phone to be notified about specific items position and interact with whole tracking system. Lukas has some nice entries and pictures in his blog here and here and some more pictures are here.



Finally, when done with all that JavaOne madness - on Saturday afternoon together with my wife I hit the road for a small vacation around national parks and such stuff. Well, small - at the end it turned out the whole trip was around 4 thousand miles - the guys at Avis have to definitely love me for driving that much (last year I was doing slightly smaller trip, just 3 thousand miles) - hopefully they won't revise their rental terms, especially the item concerning unlimited mileage :-). You can see the whole trip on the map below.


What actually very positively surprised me was the fuel consumption of the car I was using - Avis rented me Pontiac G6 GT with 3.5V6 engine and at the end of the trip the average for the whole trip was 31.9 MPG - that's 7.4 liters per 100 km - that's not a bad result for a V6 engine with automatic transmission - this is basically the same consumption I get with my car, which has 1.5 engine with less that half the power and manual transmission. I don't know why in Europe almost everybody believes american cars are very fuel hungry :-).


Anyway the trip was great, I was surprised by most of the places I traveled (that's quite a bad thing when you have to drive :-)) and I'm still wondering why the whole state of Utah is not declared as a national park - there are not many places like this on Earth.

Now it's time to get back to work :-). NetBeans 5.5 is on the way and there is still a lot of things/fixes to be done.