My guess on the fate of Symbian

According to the blog "The Really Mobile Project" Nokia is going to replace Symbian with Maemo on the high-end smartphones.

While Maemo looks quite cool I think this isn't the end of Symbian. Instead it might become the end for S40 since my guess is that Nokia will start to use Symbian for mid-range and - in the long term - for low-end phones. (Although I don't expect it to power ultra-low-cost phones like the 2330 anytime soon.)  Both market segments are not suitable for a heavy-weight like Maemo.

This makes a lot of sense since Nokia invested a lot of money into the platform and Symbian might be much more future-prove than the proprietary S40 platform.

Beside that Symbian (S60) is still one of the best platforms to run J2ME on.

Maemo: It will have to compete with Android and iPhone. I don't know if it will really gain momentum.

But only time will tell.

Hello, Android

Although Android was very appealing to me from the start I hesitated to play with it. Until now.

First I installed the SDK and was amazed by the plethora of possibilities. Compared to the quite limited J2ME world Android felt like pure freedom. I was so amazed that I bought myself a G1 from Ebay immediately.

I still have to explore a lot of the possibilities Android offers but I have seen enough to say I really like it.

I still like J2ME because it's still challenging to create useful software in such a constrained environment but it's amazing how much one can do on Android with quite a few lines of code.

The only problem with Android is the amount of apps which are already available on the Android Market. I found a solution for everything I needed up to now. While that is nice for the users it's problematic for developers. Creating something new is really hard. But you can always try to create a better app than the others.

Coverage Analysis on J2ME

Since I do TDD also on J2ME I also want to analyze the code coverage. We all know that green doesn't mean good but red definitely means bad. So I think coverage analysis is a good thing.

While for JSE/JEE there are a lot of options things are different on J2ME.

I only know of two free projects.

The first one is JInjector by Google. (http://code.google.com/p/jinjector/)

You can do much more than coverage analysis with it. (In fact I think that coverage analysis in JInjector is just a by-product.)

BUT it's not easy to configure and to use. So I had a look at Cobertura for J2ME ( http://www.cobertura4j2me.org/ ).

It's pretty easy to use and integrates nicely with ANT. So I use it. There's only one big drawback: It's terribly slow!

On one of my MIDlets running the tests with Cobertura4J2ME took 7 minutes while running the tests without took only 38 seconds.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any activity on this project so I will either have to live with it or fix it myself. (I really like to do that but currently I just don't have the time for it).