Experiments with development on the Nokia 6265
I recently got myself the Nokia 6265 CDMA phone. It is a nice phone and I intend to write a reveiw of it in my other blog one of these days. The phone supports the Nokia's Series 40 3rd Edition development platform and I am trying out developing Java Micro Edition applications for it. I hit some interesting problems and found some solutions - I am trying to chronicle them here.
Firstly, I have never done development for a mobile phone so I had to start from scratch. I wanted to know what I could do with my phone and Nokia had quite a lot of information. They have these videos of their Eclipse integration called Carbide.j which seemed interesting although a little painful (being a graphical modeling like UI and all).
I found the Nokia site a tad vague about what exactly is needed for what but eventually I figured I needed the Nokia Series 40 3rd Edition SDK. Now, Nokia has 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 and 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. It wasn't very clear to me which one would work and I chose the base version and thankfully that is the right one. Only one phone so far supports Feature pack 1 as far as I know.
After installing the SDK, the documentation said that I need a JDK, Eclipse, NDS for Java ME, and then I should install SDK. Did I mention that the Nokia site is slightly confusing? :-) I went off in search for NDS and found out that it is now renamed to Carbide.j and is a 135+ MB download. While it was downloading, I thought I would try and locate J2ME support in IntelliJ Idea.
IntelliJ Idea J2ME integration
Now, this is the nice part.
I went through the IntelliJ Idea documentation which described how to set up a J2ME module and the only part that looked a little hard was the Mobile JDK configuration. I crossed my fingers and pointed at the Nokia installation and IntelliJ found all it needed - bootclasspath, javadocs, emulator, etc. It is really sweet!!
Everything works out of the box - compile works great, and when you run it runs against the Nokia emulator. Even debugging is seamlessly supported!! Fantastic - and no need for Eclipse or the Eclipse plugins! Needless to say I cancelled my Carbide.j download. You do not need it for development on the Nokia phones. I hope the Nokia guys put this on their documentation.
One strange problem so far (in my HelloWorld application) has been that the jad and jar generated by IntelliJ is not working on my phone or on the emulator. It fails with an error message saying "Application invalid. Delete?". There is a temporary file that Idea is generating which seems to work. I think I am missing something here. I would appreciate any help.
