I feel that while I love J2ME and Java it’s hypocritical of them to have two APIs for Java. Java was designed with ‘One code, many platforms’ in mind, and now it’s more like ‘One API for every OS, and one API for everything smaller than a netbook.’ I see a lot of J2ME emulators and such being ported to things like the PSP, and other consoles for homebrew, and I wonder why no one is doing this with normal Java.
I’d love to write a game to play on my PC, than fire up a simple emulator and play the same game on the PSP, or the Dreamcast, but I can’t. J2ME can’t even run on a PC, you need an emulator for it, which reduces your market greatly. Plus most emulators are bulky, and not good.
With super-phones like the IPhone coming out people are going to want more than little J2ME games, so if Java can’t port their standard JRE to it they might find themselves missing the boat like Microsoft did with the netbook boom.
It just feels like Sun needs to ether work on making the standard JRE smaller and more portable, or making J2ME available on the PC easily.
I think this should be a community Wiki
But to the point, my view is that J2ME is going to die a horrible death and leave us with normal Java. The current Netbook trend combined with the more powerful smartphone trend means that your average cellphone today is much stronger than the machines that ran J2SE when it first came out.
Hence, we can do away with J2ME, which was designed for ancient Nokias, and enjoy the standard Java on a smart doorknob (or a smartphone).
The only problem that Java faces is that the biggest player in smartphone applications – Apple – isn’t going to allow a JVM anytime in the foreseeable future.