I have been thinking about moving my source code to a hosting service like SourceForge or other *Forge site as I would then be able to use issue management systems for my projects. I have used the CVSDude‘s Subversion services for now but now that I found out that Google has a service for hosting open source projects I switched to use it.

I have already created a project for the Car Manager application and I have imported the latest source code to Google’s Subversion repository. The project home page’s user interface is very simple and doesn’t feel as “heavy” as SourceForge’s UI, which is a good thing. The issue management system looks very simple but it contains bunch of AJAX code that makes it very easy and also very powerful to use. I’m still going to make a separate project page to my blog for screenshots and downloads. I’m using the Google’s service only for version control and managing project issues.Православни икони

NetBeans have released 5.0 Beta versions from the IDE and the Mobility Pack. The interesting new feature in the IDE is the Matisse form editor that even surpasses the Microsoft Visual Studio’s GUI editors in some areas.

What’s new in Mobility Pack 5.0:

• Improved Wireless Connection Bridge – easily access web services and other server-side data from MIDlets via servlets. The bridge now supports complex types.
• Support for Java ME Web Services (JSR 172) – Write applications that access web services directly from your phone.
• New custom components in the Visual Mobile Designer – New components enable you to add tables, wait screens, and splash screens to your user interface.
• Improved preprocessor support for device fragmentation – Develop code for any number of devices with a single code base. You can also import projects from Antenna and J2MEPolish without losing your preprocessor coding.
• Edit generated code – Guarded blocks are now more flexible, enabling you to customize code generated by the Visual Mobile Designer.
• Improved emulator support – You can now easily add custom emulators to the IDE.

As you can see from the screenshot that I have already tested the new beta release. New custom components are good addition since I have created my own splash screen for every application that I have made. Now I’m able to use only the Visual Mobile Designer to design my application’s flow and screens. This reduces the testing time and produces more stable applications.

Bill Colwill from company called apps for phones informed me kindly about the new release of their commercial rapid application development (RAD) tool, apps for phones. The version 2 has two interesting new features compared to previous release: JSR-120 implementation for sending and receiving SMS messages and support for apps for phones Basic language.

The SMS support brings great possibilities for mobile applications. It allows easy system integration and communication between two phones. It allows for example to use existing SMS gateway systems as an integration tool for between company’s internal system and mobile applications. SMS gateway systems also usually include functional invoicing framework so it can also be used as a great alternative for billing your mobile application users (eg. monthly fee). SMS messages could also be used to create a multiplayer games that would communicate game statuses and turns via SMS.

The apps for phones Basic language support points out how different approach the apps for phones team have taken. They have really thought out of the box as they have succesfully implemented a basic language to “Java” application development tool. The basic language’s syntax seems to be quite identical to Microsoft Visual Basic so it is very easy to write and many developers already are very familiar with the language so this reduces the development time for people that aren’t familiar with Java and J2ME.

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