2007-06-10 #1

j2me development on a MacBook

As already written in short on 2006-10-23#1, I am using my iBook partly for midlet development. Ivonne joined the apple club and now owns a MacBook. We just set up the development environment, but run into some problems with the mpowerplayer sdk. Running a midlet within eclipse caused a Class Format Error: Illegal exception table range in class file .... The midlet was build using the mpowerplayer sdk in eclipseME (J2ME > Create Package).

We could not figure out the cause for this behaviour. Our midlets are build using antenna tasks, which relies on a wtk. Currently no wtk is available for Mac OS from Sun, so we just copied a windows installation to have the correct file structure. The one binary to replace is the preverify executable, which comes from mpowerplayer sdk. Just put it to the wtk's bin directory.

Now the antenna build files (generated with eclipseME support) will run fine, if the packages using the preverify are set up correctly. The command line arguments for preverify from mpowerplayer differ from the sun's preverify argunents. The generated antenna build file will call the preverifier with a option cldc, which is not supported by mpowerplayer, therefore the antenna tasks need to be changed to include cldc="false".

Eventually, after successful build, the deployed jar and jad files can be tested with the mpowerplayer emulator without throwing the ClassFormatError.