I came across Arvind Gupta’s MIDP JNI site today. Arvind has been working on ways of accessing native functionality from J2ME MIDlets. The solution has been circulating for a while on the Nokia Forum discussion groups and was recently documented by Symbian. I always considered it as a bit of a ‘hack’ - I am not keen on such things as they tend to be difficult to get working and usually break when devices or operating systems change.

My views changed today when I saw Arvind’s site. He has put together what is effectively an easy to use toolkit to allow J2ME applications to access native Symbian functionality. Furthermore, he has worked out a way of auto-starting J2ME applications when the phone boots by bringing together a recognizer and the MIDP Push Registry. Ordinarily, it’s not possible to auto-start applications at boot time unless, for example with Motorola, the OEM has provided special facilities to do this. Auto start should eventually be part of MIDP 3.0.

Note that this only works for Symbian but is nevertheless a useful addition to the mobile developer’s toolkit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Symbian, Mobile, J2ME. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.