As mentioned previously, I’ve been working on developing a visual piece for a Nokia phone. After trying Mobile Processing, I came to the conclusion I’d be better off going the old school way: Pure J2ME development in Eclipse. It makes me appreciate just how easy developing in Processing really is compared to going back to the bare bones.

Seeing as my target is a Nokia phone, I figured using Nokia’s own Carbide.j tool for J2ME development. Now it looks like that was a mistake. Nokia has just announced that they’re discontinuing development of Carbide.j. Instead, they suggest two Open Source alternatives, Eclipse with the EclipseME plugin or NetBeans IDE with the NetBeans Mobility Pack.

I found out about the announcement while trying to repair my apparently broken install of Carbide.j, so I’ve now made the jump to EclipseME and dumped Carbide.j altogether. EclipseME feels much better integrated with the IDE, running a MIDLet in a given emulator is as easy as running a regular app. Carbide.j forced you to use a series of clumsy steps just to get the emulator up and running.

Right now everything’s running flawlessly except when I try to use Nokia’s S60 3rd Edition (FP 1) emulator. It barfs at the step of creating the JAR file for some reason. I guess I’ll just stick to Sun's WT5 2.5 emulator and forget about using any fancy Nokia-specific stuff like transparency. The upside is that my final app will theoretically run on any MIDP 2.0 phone.

Update: When trying to install my MIDP application generated with EclipseME on the Nokia phone I kept getting “Invalid JAR” errors. According to a post on eclipseme-users, this is due to EclipseME not including a vital piece of information in the JAD file. To fix it, simply open the generated JAD file with a text editor and add the following:

MIDlet-1: Classname,,packagename.Classname

“Classname” should be the name of your MIDlet class, “packagename” should be the name of the package it’s in. After I added this line to the JAD it installed just fine.