MicroEmulator for MacOS j2me development

Rapid J2ME Development
with eclipse on Mac OS

Currently (july07), it is still complicated to use MacOS X as a development platform for midlets. Nevertheless, it is possible and mostly the tools available for windows can be used for the Mac platform as well. Especially the MicroEmulator allows a very elegant way to develop your next j2me application.

Here is a collection of tools you can use for MacOS J2ME development.

Tools

eclipse

Get and install the eclipse for Mac OS. This is the base for midlet development.

mpowerplayer

Get the mpowerplayer SDK. This provides the necessary tools (actually the preverifier) to make your midlets run on a real device.

antenna + wtk

If you plan to build your code with antenna: Get and unzip antenna. Get and unzip a WTK for Linux from sun. Even if you do not need the binaries, antenna expects certain files and strucutres for its tasks (I am sure you actually do not need the WTK, but did not spend time on investigating it). You might use the preverifier from mpowerplayer by replacing the wtk preverifier exectuable. This requires to have a cldc="false" parameter added to the wtkpreverify task in eclipseme-build.xml file. I do not like this also, but it worked for me.

ProGuard

Get and unzip ProGuard

eclipseME

Get and install eclipseME. It will allow adding mpowerplayer as a toolkit. You can also add antenna and ProGuard support within the J2ME settings of eclipseME. Actually with eclipse 3.2.2 I could not manage to set the preverifier for the mpowerplayer device. So I used antenna to finally create a preverified midlet jar file. I did not manage to use the context menu on a eclipse project for J2ME>create package as it threw a ClassFormatError to me on starting mpowerplayer. Attention: for J2ME projects, you need to set the compiler's source level to 1.3!

MicroEmulator

Get and unzip MicroEmulator. Create a run configuration for a Java Application using your midlet project. Define org.microemu.app.Main as the Main class. Use an alternate JRE on the JRE Tab defining a J2SE (JVM 1.5.0) and finally add the mircoemulator.jar to the Classpath (classpath tab) as the first user entry. As a program argument for the run configuration specify your midlet's full class name. This will enable you to rapidly develop and debug your midlet without the need to create a built jar/jad.