The most infuriating thing was extreme fragmentation when it came to support of various APIs in devices, even devices from the same vendor. Nokia was prominently culpable of this. The Finnish giant vomited out an enormous stream of S40 and S60 phones whose support for APIs was all over the map, which meant producing a shitload of JARs depending of what you needed, and the code was cluttered with constant checks of what is supported and what not. What an irony given Java's official motto of "Write once, run anywhere". Just freaking no.
Being a developer for Nokia was its own kind of hell. They never understood what API standardization is for and didn't care about your time and effort.
Hey, here are 12 different devices for this year with different hardware, screen size and other equipment, and you'd better get your hands on all of them to make sure that your app really works and looks acceptably, because an emulator only gets you half way. Also, any firmware update from us can kick your house of cards apart, and there will be like three of them coming in the next year. Happy programming!
> whose support for APIs was all over the map, which meant producing a shitload of JARs depending of what you needed
I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually one of the reasons why Sun fought MS and Google when they tried to make their own "Java" versions (embrace+extend). They didn't want a repeat of the J2ME situation.
The most infuriating thing was extreme fragmentation when it came to support of various APIs in devices, even devices from the same vendor. Nokia was prominently culpable of this. The Finnish giant vomited out an enormous stream of S40 and S60 phones whose support for APIs was all over the map, which meant producing a shitload of JARs depending of what you needed, and the code was cluttered with constant checks of what is supported and what not. What an irony given Java's official motto of "Write once, run anywhere". Just freaking no.
Being a developer for Nokia was its own kind of hell. They never understood what API standardization is for and didn't care about your time and effort.
Hey, here are 12 different devices for this year with different hardware, screen size and other equipment, and you'd better get your hands on all of them to make sure that your app really works and looks acceptably, because an emulator only gets you half way. Also, any firmware update from us can kick your house of cards apart, and there will be like three of them coming in the next year. Happy programming!