Rating: 
Summary: MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for J2ME
Review: This is one of a class of books that every application developer should
read, and that not enough do. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is
expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a Usability
Guide and give a better idea of it's usefulness.MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It's a
fairly new specification. Nokia, for example, have only announced support for
this on their Series 60 devices in the last couple of months and I'm not aware
of software or firmware upgrades for legacy devices yet. A lot of the content
in this book can be usefully applied to MIDP 1.0 devices though. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform Micro Edition is a widget
by widget guide to best practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The
information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME
programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. The latter
particularly doesn't come cheap, and is out of the reach of most individual
programmers and small companies. So there is real value for money here. The layout is very browseable, with most chapters being a set of
recommendations for a specific for specific widget such as a text box or a
gauge. For the most part each chapter follows a standard format, that is
defined in the introduction. There are two target audiences here; J2ME developers and MIPDP 2.0
implementors. For the former it's an excellent resource. For the latter I
would say it was pretty much required reading. This is because it ends up
defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application
developers. For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes, Application Developers<
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL,
NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not
typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..." And in the next paragraph, MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to
enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities." Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been
followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations. There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Large chunks of
it are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. This is only to
be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this
may help to define the standard if people use what they give.
I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future
versions of the MIDP specification.
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