Recently I've found a very interesting demo about design and development of AGUI applications with NetBeans Mobility. Roman Strobl demonstrated how easily we can create a real mobile application now. A lot of people used to learn new areas with dirty hands trying to do something with it. It's exactly for them. We need just several clicks to create the HelloWorld mobile swing applet. At least it makes sense to look at this demo.

To make it complete we need just more adoption of AGUI by phone manufacturers, namely AGUI technology implemented on our phones :-).

Yesterday the final release of the JSR 248: Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) technology was made available. MSA defines the next generation mobile platform for high volume handsets. It's not a first attempt to define a unified Java application environment standard for mobile phones. 3 years ago the JSR 185: JavaTM Technology for the Wireless Industry (JTWI) specification was released. Both technologies represent an umbrella over existing and new JSRs. MSA continues the work started in JSR-185 and defines a common set of APIs and clarifications to those APIs to provide a common and consistent platform.

It seems to be a Christmas present to the Java ME world.

I heard several times that it's not quite clear what is the difference between JT harness and ME Framework. Yesterday one good analogy crossed my mind.

Imagine that you have a media player which has a pluggable architecture. It means that you can extend the base functionality of the player with a set of plug-ins. New video or audio format, new rendering types... No problem. All you need is to install the corresponding plug-in. Even if there is no such plug-in - you can create it by yourself.

JT Harness is exactly corresponding to such media player. It's a general test harness which doesn't know anything about Java ME specific requirements. At the same time ME Framework can be considered as a set of plug-ins to enable effective testing of Java ME stack. It contains the support of Java ME specific tests and features and allows you to quickly create test suite for Java ME stack.

The first public release of the Sun Java Toolkit 1.0 for CDC is happened this week. It represents a set of tools to develop applications for Java ME CDC platform. It supports the following Java ME technologies: CDC 1.1, FP 1.1, PBP 1.1 and AGUI 1.0.

Support of AGUI means that now you can create your applications for mobile and consumer devices using well-known API from Java SE Swing and Java 2D. In the next posts I'm going to cover it in more details.

The most important fact is that Sun Java Toolkit together with Sun Java Wireless Toolkit (former J2ME Wireless Toolkit) support now both existing Java ME platforms (CDC and CLDC). They are fully integrated with NetBeans Mobility Pack. So you can take advantage of using IDE.

But less words. Let's take it at http://java.sun.com/products/cdctoolkit/download-1_0.html and try.

Today it has been announced that Java ME technology is made open source. You can download the source code and run it. But the most exciting for us is that you can test it now as well with two open-source projects JT Harness and ME Framework. Just click on the corresponding links to check these projects on java.net.

The JT harness is based on Sun Microsystem's JavaTest™ harness. It is a general purpose, fully-featured, flexible, and configurable test harness very well suited for most types of unit testing. Originally developed as a test harness to run TCK test suites, it has since evolved into a general purpose test platform.

The cqME project is the home for Java™ ME platform compatibility and quality testing. It contains the ME Framework module and is a portal to the JT harness project site. You can use these technologies to create test suites, including technology compatibility kit (TCK) test suites that test the quality of Java ME technologies and the compatibility of these technologies with their specifications.