J2ME is quite WORA

From a prototype working in WTK to device in no time! Well, of course attention has to be paid... and conscious decisions to use (or, rather, not use) certain API levels. Overall, enjoyable experience I could recommend to anyone. After all, all software to get from one's idea to an app deployable to device is FREE. Netbeans 5 with Mobility Pack was all I needed to develop, and Motorola MidWay + USB cable + drivers were used to upload app to my phone. Although, frankly, I would have preferred using OTA as my USB cable has really bad contact, connection is unreliable. This app by no means is impressive, but if it is of utility, that justifies its existence and (as little as it looks to take) effort.

Got my spare time assigned.... (J2ME)

So, I allowed myself to be dragged (kicking and screaming? no, not really) into a small but hopefully useful project. It will take a couple of weeks, I hope, to make mobile version of "Word Matching Game" available to users of site of my good friend.

Initially, I sketched out a full-blown app, with the following online features:
- account registration
- lesson selection
- statistics management

(Small rant: how I wish J2ME integrated better with native browser on a phone. All of that could be much more easily delivered by a small set of xHTML pages instead... Oh well.)

But it became obvious that number of states and screens in such a small app grows disproportionately fast. I decided to approach the probem by simply wrapping the content in a simpler game version. This one will be "disposable" in the sense that for next selection of pair of languages and set of words, user will have to download a new game. Luckily, the size of compiled and obfuscated Java code is really small this way, so hopefully this will be a small inconvenience.

There will be other issues that I will have to tackle for the first time, namely, application delivery. I haven't looked around for free methods of doing so, yet. Short URL service? Sending SMS from server? Those all would be quite nice to have... We'll se how it goes.