Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

Since Android Dalvik VM supports a collection of core Java SE packages, you can imagine porting an existing Java application is fairly easy, including a Java ME emulator implementation. Poliplus Software has ported ME4SE to android:

Since the Android SDK came out last week, I’ve been toying with the idea of porting ME4SE into Android as to make it as easy as possible to port over current JavaME code. With ME4Android, I wanted the porting to be done automatically so no lines of JavaME code would need to be modified but only the build scripts, so targeting Android would only require a rebuild of current JavaME code.

On my first pass at ME4Android, I used our rather large JavaME app called FlyerApp as the test app. This code is done completely on top of Canvas so it only uses JavaME’s low level user interface libraries. The code uses a few threads, supports animations and does networking. I figured if ME4Android can run FlyerApp, it will be able to run a lot of Java games too.

According to the press release, Esmertec is providing Java ME VM on top of Android.

Thanks to the availability of our Jbed™ Java™ VM on the Android platform, we offer immediate compatibility to the standard Java ME world to enable Java ME-based mobile services with the Android platform.

It is disappointing that Sun is missing from the Open Handset Alliance member list, although its Java FX Mobile is running on top of Linux kernel. Motorola (as a founding member of Android) has its own Mobile Linux and Apache licensed MIDP implementation (2.1 and 3.0). I am not sure how Motorola and Google to cooperate the Linux code base, but those Java ME projects seem to be a nature fit.