How long will CLDC/MIDP last

[lnoelstorr],

Since no one has replied to you on this, I thought I'll take a stab at it and try to address your question.

The CLDC 1.0 specification is the very foundation of the Java runtime environment for devices that have limited resources. Typically such mobile devices which includes more than just mobilephones such as pagers and PDAs, should approximately have hardware resources with:

(1) 16/32-bit RISC/CISC CPUs or controllers.

(2) 160-512 kilobtyes or less memory available, with 128kilobytes as memory space for the K virtual machine and libraries.

(3) Limited in power consumption, mostly if not all are battery powered.

(4) Limited bandwitdh and may not be always connected to the network of sorts.

Yes, the Nokia Communicator contain hardware specification that probably way surpasses the CLDC/MIDP requirements but for now the Nokia Communicator has a very niche market share unlike the volume based mobilephones hardware which have very limited resources as described in the CLDC/MIDP specification. Apart from that, there are other devices that require the CLDC/MIDPs' small set of J2ME API libraries and a small virtual machine like the KVM e.g. the RIM pagers and similar devices, some PDAs which have CPUs that are limited in processing capabilities and basic UI interface.

Yes, no doubt that we can expect such mobile devices to have more powerful CPU processing power and memory but yet remain small in size in the future. Perhaps then the developer community would have to migrate to PJava and CDC. However until such times, when the J2ME devices hardware specifications exceeds the CLDC/MIDP requirements, we would still have all the current limited connection hardware that will need the KVM and CLDC.

One more important point that I must make in this reply is that your current time and resources invested in writing CLDC/MIDP applications will be protected since MIDlets are J2ME upward compatible i.e. a MIDlet can run in a CDC java runtime environment without the need to recoded and recompiled.

HTH. Your thoughts are welcomed.

Allen Lai

Developer Technical Support

SUN Microsystems

http://www.sun.com/developers/support/

allenlai at 2007-7-2 2:36:17 >