j2me
A while back, I started developing a little application for my cell phone. It's progressing nicely, although I do have a few issues; the main one is the fact that the java mobility toolkit is written in C rather than Java, and that it is not open source. As a result, I cannot run it on my powerbook, but have to install the thing on an i386 machine to be able to use it. Which sucks, majorly.
I had started to write a blog post to outline how this sucks, and that I didn't think highly of sun, until I stumbled upon this:
Sun plans to open source the entire Java ME (mobile) platform (both CLDC and CDC) and we are targeting to roll this out by the end of 2006.
Well, that would be interesting.
With microemulator from
http://microemulator.sourceforge.net/
you can compile and run simple j2me programs with only free software (ecj+jamvm+gnu classpath in current debian sid). At least jmirc from http://jmirc.sf.net/ seems to run and build just fine.