I remember one of the meetings of the Russian leader M. Gorbachev with American President R. Reagan about nuclear arms reduction. It's happened in 1987 President Reagan used to repeat one of Russian proverbs "Trust but verify". I was impressed because he cited it in Russian.

This blog is following above proverb. I'd like to show here why you can trust to the Java ME platform. I'll do it in two ways. First of all, by discussing testing tools for Java ME platform (like JT harness and ME Framework). Also I'm going to describe new and existing technologies from the Java ME world.

It's my last post in 2006. Happy New Year!!!

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.

Google is no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP Search API. Instead of the SOAP service they suggest to use the AJAX Search API.

Of course, the AJAX interface is a great approach for a lot of users. Just few lines of Java Script and you have the search widget from Google at your site. But what does it mean really? Now, we can't access the data of the search. The base for a lot of nice mash-ups is abolished. AJAX widget doesn't allow you to interpret the result of search.

There is an alternative Yahoo! Search Web Service based on the REST. But there is no guarantee for how long. At least now it continues to work, and hearing this frustrating news, first of all, I registered my Application Id at http://api.search.yahoo.com/webservices/register_application for this Yahoo! Search Web service.

Such decision of Google should not be considered as a victory of REST over SOAP. It's a big problem for both of them and a hard blow for the open data. This situation reminds me the famous phrase of Gogol "I begot you, and now I shall kill you".

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.