Substance of Code

I have not been a great fan of RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools as I wish to keep my hands dirty on the code level. But as I first tried the new NetBeans IDE 4.1 beta I was stunned how much the UI designer can speed up the development time for J2ME applications. The new UI and application flow designers are well designed and easy to use.

After I had played with the NetBeans, I thought that it was the only tool that allowed this kind of rapid development. But few days ago I got an email from Bill Colwill from the company called apps for phones, who was kind enough to introduce me to their new development tool called apps for phones. The minute I tried this new software I was stunned even more. The apps for phones lets you design the UI with custom components that look the same on several J2ME platforms as compared to native J2ME applications that may look a lot different depending on the used device. The software is really easy to use as even sales men can design applications (although I can’t say this is a good thing).

Altogether the software seems to be too good to be true as I was able to create a simple grocery list application in a few hours from start to finish and I could emulate it instantly on multiple devices with genuine look and feel. I think this is the best part of this software as it includes multiple fully integrated device emulators for easy testing. Usually if I ever wanted to test an application on different manufacturers phone I had to download an emulator from the manufacturer (if it was even available) and pray that it would work with the current IDE enviroment.

I encourage all of you J2ME enthusiastics and non-developers to try the demo version of this apps for phones software. The demo version and additional information can be obtained from their website at http://www.appsforphones.com

For a comparison try out the new NetBeans IDE 4.1 beta’s mobile UI designer at http://www.netbeans.org

Still… :) I will keep my hands dirty with the source code, but I can quite well understand the benefits that are made possible by using this kind of RAD tools as they can really cut down the development costs for mobile application development.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2005 at 20:15 and is filed under Link, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.