any particular reason why the subtitle for this article is :

"Review On day two of the Pirate Bay trial, the prosecution has sensationally dropped half the charges against the four men behind the notorious file-sharing website"

JavaME's window of opportunity died when they yielded to mobile network operators and introduced certificates and signed applications. Case in point - every advanced feature on mobile phones that JavaME has access to (camera, bluetooth, Internet access, sensors, file system access [not private data access; regular mp3-storing-kind file system]) is restricted only to signed applications. This is killing small, independent developers (shareware / freeware) that made such a big part of what e.g. PalmOS once was. Often, it's not enough to sign applications (midlets) by a well-known CA (Thawte etc.) but the application needs to be signed by a carrier-specific CA before it can use these features.

A direct consequence of this is that freely available JavaME applications usually look crummy and outdated, which then sheds a bad light on the entire platform. About the only popular category of midlets are games, distributed, of course, by cell operators, which is a shame when the platform is in the ideal position to do a lot more.

Of course, if JavaFX mobile needs any kind of upgrade or an add-on runtime library to existing JavaME installations (which seems likely), it will be stillborn.

Matt,

Thanks for the mention in this article. I do look forward to a good set of skinnable, CSS-styled, set of UI controls for JavaFX. This will accelerate the development of JavaFX apps, including mobile devices.

Jim Weaver

http://JavaFXpert.com (Learn JavaFX blog)

Agreed - even a freely available "developer" certificate would be nice. I wanted to get into homebrew mobile apps with Java ME, but I can't justify 300 quid for a certificate for something which I'm in all likelihood never going to pass to another person.

I can understand some of the reasons behind it - stopping "dodgy" apps sending SMS messages every second, or downloading buckets of data maliciously, basically anything that would cost - but if I want a homebuilt GPS tracking app on my phone I have to fork out quite a chunk of cash for one user.