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Monday November 06, 2006 |
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What's new in Mobility Pack 5.5
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NetBeans
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I'll try to summarize the new features in Mobility Pack 5.5 release. I've already blogged about them but it could be useful to list all the features at one place.
New Features
There are two new features in the 5.5 release of the Mobility Pack. Support for JUnit testing on mobile devices and support for developing applications using JSR226 - Scalable 2D Vector Graphics (SVG).
Support for SVG
New custom components for easy use of SVG are in Visual Mobile Designer palette. You can preview a SVG file directly in IDE. It's possible to browse the SVG components tree. You cannot edit the SVF file directly in Mobility Pack. OTOH, you can start an external SVG editor from IDE. When your device doesn't support JSR 226 then you can generate PNGs from SVG image or sequence of PNGs from SVG animation.
Support for JUnit Testing
Generate tests with wizard in the same way how are you used to in Java SE. The generated test classes use JMUnit framework.
There is another framework that you can use to test on mobile devices - J2MEUnit. The library for J2MEUnit is included in NetBeans Mobility Pack.
It seems that these frameworks should be merged into one in next release.
Other News and Noteworthy
There is lot of small improvements and changes that deserve to be noticed. There is finally D'n'D support for images in Visual Designer. Just drag and drop an image to a Form opened in Screen Designer then new Image and ImageItem will be created automatically. The visual midlets version increased therefore you cannot open 5.5 visual midlets in older Mobility Pack versions. There were fixed some bugs with custom TableItem component. It didn't displayed itself correctly on some devices. The issue was solved by new class that manages colors of the table on device - ColorSchema.
Looot of issues.
There are bad news too. JAX-WS webservice clients are not visible in Mobile Client to Web Application Wizard. You can use only Java EE 4 webservice clients.
There is SVG support but you have to download emulator with SVG by yourself(E.g. Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5 Beta). You can use Java ME Platform SDK Catalog Update Center to do it from IDE.
How this Release Became My Nightmare
Well, the Mobility Pack 5.5 release started as only bug fixing release. Only some well defined bug fixes for the critical bugs should be included in the release. How the time went and the release cycle was longer and longer because of the new Java EE features more and more bugs looked like that they deserved to be fixed. There was even a feature added after Beta2 when the code base should be stable enough. From my point of view (quality assurance engineer) this release became a nightmare. I'm responsible for quality and when we achieve a state when the release was stable then new feature was added. The work started again from the start.... Does it look like waste of time? ARGGH. I'm really glad that the release is finally out and we can focus on the CDC Pack for 5.5 and 6.0 release.
Download
NetBeans IDE together with all the packs, Mobility Pack of course too, is on the netbeans.org site.
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( Nov 06 2006, 03:47:45 PM CET )
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