Acquiring And Installing The J2ME Development Kit

Acquiring and Installing the J2ME Development Kit

Getting started with developing applications (henceforth called "MIDlets") for the J2ME platform is easy. Although device manufacturers install and prepackage their devices with this JVM (and associated APIs), you still need to install the J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 on your development machine. Before that, however, you must also have the Java Development Kit (JDK), version 1.4.2 or greater, installed.

Warning: I had problems getting the Wireless Toolkit to work properly with JDK 5.0. If you don't need the latest features in version 5.0, it is best to stick to any 1.4.2 version. I have used 1.4.2_05 for all examples in this series.

You need this Toolkit because it contains tools that are important in generating MIDlets. This Toolkit provides the development environment for the MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1 (and for MIDP 1.0 and CLDC 1.0, since these parameters are backwards compatible), and it provides the optional packages required for the optional libraries, like 3D and Mobile Media applications. Lastly, it provides the ability to sign your MIDlets so that they can be authenticated before installation on a remote mobile device.

Once you download the installation package for the Toolkit, install it in the directory of your choice. The default, on Windows, is C:\WTK22, and this will be the installation directory for the examples in this series as well. I will not explain the directories created under this folder just now. Before I do that, let us try and understand the process of generating a MIDlet from scratch.