Online demo of WapcamLet: How to play midlet on a computer
By wapcamer on Friday 3 August 2007, 02:14 - Wapcam Project - Permalink
A midlet is a piece of Java software specially dedicated to mobile phones or
resource limited devices.
Although written in Java, they are not supposed to be played on a regular
computer because the libraries they rely on are not the same (to make it very
very simple).
However, different projects aim to recreate the underlying libraries so that a
midlet can be played or tested with you computer.
This is the ideal occasion to demonstrate WapcamLet as an applet in your browser for testing two different such libs.
JavaSE implementations of MIDP
The reason why midlets can't be run on computers is that they do not use the
same Java classes as JavaSE. Actually, MIDP
classes are set on top of and next to CLDC classes and both of
them are required to run midlets on mobile devices. For simplicity we will
refer to them just as MIDP. They offer a simplified subset of JavaSE classes as
it is no use for limited devices to pretend use the whole Java2 stuff; which is
by the way far too big to be embedded on phones.
Thus, porting CLDC and MIDP to JavaSE is all you need to run your favourite midlets on computers. As you will see, you can also run midlets in browser. Unfortunately, applets security systems prevent an applet from making network calls to somewhere else than the site that hosts them. Hence I won't be able to demonstrate to you WapcamLet connecting to my WapcamServer demo.
Attention: You need to have Java Runtime (JRE) installed in order to run the following applets.
ME4SE from kObjects
ME4SE is
one such porting of MIDP to JavaSE ans it works good.
It doesn't come with a device skin but if you need that, you can check MobileRunner from Wap3. Its drawbacks are that it has a restrictive
licence and it doesn't seem to have been updated for a year now.
Click directly on the screen elements to trigger actions
MicroEmulator project
MicroEmulator distributed under the LGPL. That makes it free to use. It is a very nice looking project offering three different skins and still being maintained. Its drawback is that, well, it doesn't work with WapcamLet !! As you can see, the midlet is launched but for an unknown reason, you cannot navigate in the menu and access the different pages.
I still want to talk about it as I have the seen Opera Mini working with it and I find it a good lib though.
Emulators
Emulators are well known by midlet developpers as they are maybe the most
handy tool. They are slightly different than the two previous libs.
Their purpose is not only to implement specific classes related to CLDC/MIDP
(midlet specific Java classes) but to reproduce a real handset on your
computer. They are designed in order to facilitate development and debugging of
midlet and allow special monitoring of system calls, heap and stack
consumption, network use etc...
Running them is generally consumming a lot of resources of your PC and thus,
they are not really designed to be used to run midlet in "normal" conditions.
Still you can use them occasionnaly if you want so.
You should at first head to Sun Microsystem's WTK as the WTK includes a standard ugly emulator. According to your handset's manufacturer, there may also exist specific emulator to reproduce your device more closely. Forum Nokia is a reference for Nokia devices (and not only). You should find similar toolkits from Sony-Ericsson, Samsung,...
