- Mobile Computing: Smaller Is Beautiful
- The Different Flavors of J2ME
- The Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CLDC 2.5.2
- The CDC Toolkit and Xlets
- Conclusion
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
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The Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CLDC 2.5.2
The Wireless Toolkit is easy to use. After download and installation, it places a desktop icon on Windows. When you run the associated application, you should see the basic menu illustrated in Figure 1.
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Figure 1 The Wireless Toolkit
What I like about this toolkit is its simplicity—its designers didn't try to be too clever. So, getting started with the toolkit is pretty straightforward. After selecting the Open Project menu in Figure 1, you'll see a menu like that in Figure 2. The items listed here represent all the sample projects that come bundled with the Wireless Toolkit.
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Figure 2 The project menu
It's nearly always easier to get into a new technology by looking at and modifying an example. Try selecting the project named Jbricks. It will be loaded and you can then run it by pressing the Run button. After a few seconds, you'll see something like Figure 3.
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Figure 3 A Wireless Toolkit example application
Notice that Figure 3 looks just like a mobile phone! This is intentional and represents one of the techniques commonly used in building software for embedded environments. Rather than having to download your code to a real device, you can use an emulator like that in Figure 3. This allows you test your code without tying up or possibly crashing a real device. Once you get the hang of the emulator environment, you forget that it isn't a real phone.
The JBricks demo doesn't really do very much for a beginner in this technology, so close the window in Figure 3 and load another project. Try the one called Games (Figure 4).
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Figure 4 The Games Wireless Toolkit example project
To select one of the games in Figure 4, select the middle button in the top row just below the screen. This launches the associated game as illustrated in Figure 5.
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Figure 5 An example game
Once the game pops up, you can interact it just as though you were using a real mobile phone—the magic of software! To look at the code behind the example projects, you need to open the associated folder under the Apps directory. That directory is located under the location where you installed the Wireless Toolkit.
At this point, you should be able to get started playing around with the example Wireless Toolkit projects. So let's take a look at the CDC toolkit next.