Hunt for J2ME-friendly IoC container is included!

Question

I'm in the early stages of the Blackberry / J2ME project - and along with the other limitations that come with this wonderful platform, the lack of thought support and level 1.3 means that the vast majority of existing IoC containers are unusable. (Google has Guice for Android without AOP, but even this requires annotation support).

Thus, the IoC container space on J2ME is quite limited. One frame that caught my attention is called the Signal Framework , and it looks pretty promising. It tries to stay conceptually close to the Spring Framework IoC by implementing a small subset of its functionality and does so without relying on modifying the bytecode or on parsing the xml runtime. Instead, it processes XML configuration files at build time to create Java code that implements this IoC functionality.

Generally speaking, generating code at build time seems like a very wise approach for mobile applications - and if my application needs to do less XML parsing on a user device, that's fine too!

So, what were your impressions of IoC implementation at J2ME / CLDC and how could you put out this bitter taste in your mouth?

Answer 1

Signal Framework is.

Update: unfortunately, the Signal is very naughty right now, so I'm going with Israfil IOC with custom add-ons.

Answer 2

We used Spring ME in TomTom. It worked out very well.

Answer 3

In J2ME, you need to reduce the number of classes you use as much as possible in order to reduce the size of the jar files. This leads to many design trade-offs, including flexibility.

It’s not easy to adapt to J2ME development when you need to drop everything that you have learned (and really appreciate) about OO from the window. In truth, if you want applications that can be run on a large number of phones, you need to be very sensitive to device limitations.

As such, I don’t think that the IoC framework will meet many people's needs for J2ME development.

Answer 4

You may be interested in checking out FallME . Despite the fact that I did not use it personally, it seems like there is no non-semantic structure specially created for the J2ME platform.

Answer 5

I stumbled upon Spring ME at a Dutch JUG conference (have no experience with it at all).