A mobile computing aside
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007Is Savaje dead? I tried to access last week the Savaje developer wiki and forums, looking for updated developer tools. The developer sites seem to be down, although the company web site is still up. After doing some research on the web I found out that apparently it has closed its doors. I was one of many who jumped at the chance at and after the last Java One to get one of their developer edition Jasper S20 cell phones.
I found the device very capable and fun to develop for, even if the tools were a bit crude and buggy. It still is as far as I know the only phone to implement the JSR209, advanced graphics and UI for J2ME. JSR209 provides Swing support for J2ME and simplifies considerably the porting of Swing applications to J2ME, at least if your application can scale to the smaller screen, resolution and limited keyboard input. I ported a game I had done originally as a demo for the Nexaweb RIA Platform and it required only very minor modifications to get it running on the S20.
I think it is a shame; for all the relative success that J2ME has enjoyed in the cell phone market particularly with games, I think the fragmentation of the J2ME has hurt its adaptation as a computing platform and limited development to a lowest common denominator API subset (to some extent). And then you have the locked until crippled, nickel and dime mentality of many cell phone operators (and sometimes manufacturers) but that is a topic for another day.
It will be interesting to see what happens with Flash Lite. Will there be a Flex lite as well?