I have to develop a Java ME (formerly known as J2ME) application that will take advantage of Bluetooth technology to communicate with other instances of itself on other mobile devices.
I know that both NetBeans and Eclipse offer an integrated environment to develop Java ME applications.
Which one is more mature and stable? Which one offers better tools?
My application has to communicate to many more devices running the same app and so I need to test my application with multiple instances of emulators running it and allowing these emulator instances to see each other via the Java ME Bluetooth APIs.
Will I be able to do this?
I’ve used both Eclipse and Netbeans in the past. For my final year project at university, I had to build a J2ME application which could communicate between several different mobile devices.
Netbeans has native J2ME integration, which I found more reassuring than having to use a third-party addon for Eclipse. Although I prefer Eclipse as an IDE, Netbeans was a lot easier to set up J2ME emulation etc. It allowed me to run several instances of the mobile device emulator and virtually communicate between them using Bluetooth.
You can also download and install various SDKs from phone manufacturers (Sony Ericsson etc) if you want to hook up their specific emulators to Netbeans.