Mobile development tools: although much of the challenge of mobile development comes down to good old-fashioned architecture and coding, you can ease the workload by choosing the right tool for the job.

RECENTLY, I WAS WATCHING MY DVD of The 5th Element with my son when it occurred to me that writing code for mobile devices is kind of like being the inventor of the turkey dinner in a cube Milla Jovanovich's character eats at the priest's house. (If you haven't seen this movie, it's a fun and very geeky romp.)

Let me explain. When you think of a turkey dinner, what comes to mind? If you're in the U.S., you probably think of Thanksgiving--a cornucopia of food that's pleasing to both the palate and the eye. Imagine taking your Thanksgiving feast and pressing it into a cube about the size of a deck of cards. Think that sounds tough? That's what mobile device developers are called on to do every day.

Your users have been jaded by the sensory feast that is the modern personal computer. Multi-media sound with virtual three-dimensional encoding, ultra-high-resolution screens with 128 megabytes of memory to make them lightning fast, the ability to burn gigabytes of data onto a DVD, and virtual laser imaging keyboards--this is what your audience is used to. As a mobile developer, however, you're probably handed something like the noble but somewhat limited Palm V and asked to put the corporate database on it. The company isn't going to spring for new Tungstens for everyone, so you'll just have to make due in the 2MB of memory that is your least common denominator.

Now that's a challenge. While a lot of this challenge comes down to good old-fashioned architecture/design and coding, you can ease much of the workload by choosing the right tool for the job. In this article, I look at several of these tools and summarize their basic capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Specifically I'll evaluate seven tools:

* Microsoft eMbedded Visual Tools

* IBM WebSphere Studio Device Developer

* Metrowerks CodeWarrior

* Borland C++ BuilderX and JBuilderX

* J2ME 

Qualcomm BREW

Microsoft embedded Visual Tools http://www.microsoft.com Free

The 2003 edition of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET officially replaces eMbedded Visual Tools (EVT), but for those of us with smaller budgets, this tool still does the job very easily. To find it, go to the Microsoft download site at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for eMbedded Visual Tools. Be prepared though, the 2002 version is more than 210MB, and the previous version is more than 300MB--and you might need them both!

You might be interested in the older version because there are some devices that support Pocket PC, but not Pocket PC 2002; I recently discovered this important detail when writing some code for an older release of the Symbol PPT 2800 device. If in doubt, go with the older version first. (The 2002 version shows as EVT 2002, the other just shows as EVT). There is very little difference between the development environments, but the Pocket PC 2002 SDK that the newer version installs can really mess up development on the older PDAs and phones.

Figure 1 shows the eMbedded Visual Basic environment, but the eMbedded Visual C is also similar to the C environment in VS 6. As you can see, there is a layered tool palette on the left with the standard ActiveX type tools, a project window on the upper right, and the properties window on the bottom right. The center of the screen is available for code and the visual design. The code windows have the thoughtful color-coding and auto-completion capabilities you've become used to. The standard debugging capabilities are there too, but beware--their emulators aren't completely accurate and debugging on the devices themselves is extremely laborious.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In this environment, you can develop applications for any device that runs Windows CE, Pocket PC, or SmartPhone. The new .NET offers similar limitations on devices, with the "Smart Device" projects available under the VB and C# environments.

IBM WebSphere Studio Device Developer

http://www.ibm.com $599

WebSphere Studio Device Developer is part of the WebSphere Studio suite of products, so if you're comfortable and familiar with those tools, you'll find yourself right at home here. In addition, IBM has standardized on the Eclipse platform for its workbench environment. Eclipse gives developers a single open-source tool environment into which they can plug lava development tools from different vendors. This is certainly an idea whose time has come. A number of vendors are using Eclipse as a base for their products, making skillsets more transferable as developers move from one job/language/platform to the next.

The workbench consists of perspectives, views, and editors. A perspective is a group of views and editors focused on a particular type of development (figure 2). For example, you can have a perspective specific to doing C++ development as opposed to doing lava development. Each language and project provides its own particular perspective of the work environment (workbench) and you can have multiple perspectives open in the workbench at any one time. Views, unsurprisingly, are available for viewing resources, starting editors, etc. while editors are specifically oriented towards manipulating various project resources (source files, etc.). As you can see, the environment is simple and open. You can do some pretty cool things, for example loading in Rational Rose design docs to have it generate code and stubs for you. But in the end, this is where you'll be coding and debugging. Personally, I like having the outline view available (shown on the right-hand side of the screen) because it makes it easy to find methods, variables, and the like. You can, however, choose your own personal preference then save it as a perspective for later use.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The focus of WSDD is lava-based or lava-supported devices. In the lava world--this basically means J2ME. Both Connected Device Configuration (CDC) and Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) are supported with a project frame provided for creating MIDlet Suites. It also supports C, C++, and full lava development (for devices that support it) as well as a wide variety of platforms including several Palm variations, Nokia, Linux, Windows CE, and Pocket PC. You can even build onto the Eclipse environment by using one of the two provided Eclipse modeling framework project shells.

Metrowerks CodeWarrior

http://www.metrowerks.com $1,674

For a long time, many considered CodeWarrior to be the king of mobile development tools. The CodeWarrior product for developing C code for the Palm OS was, and probably still is, used by more developers of Palm software than any other tool. Metrowerks has a history of providing development tools for the breadth of the mobile world and still provides more than 31 different versions to support various architectures. The version I evaluated is the Metrowerks CodeWarrior Professional 5.2.1 for Symbian OS. Symbian is a small-footprint device operating system that's supported by a variety of mobile phone developers including Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola. It s a feature-rich environment with some powerful extensions for building applications for mobile handsets.

CodeWarrior for Symbian was a bit of a disappointment for me I've been using CodeWarrior for Palm and some straight C development on and off for several years, but it's been a while since I've used it. In a straight comparison against the other products available in this space, I was left a little flat-footed. Although it has all the standard IDE components you'd expect (editors, debuggers, object browsers, etc.), they aren't easily or intuitively put together. Even the help system appeared a bit cumbersome, using CodeWarrior-specific terms (layout is the generic term for user screen, for example). It's also missing some of the niceties like automatic code hiding, term completion, etc. that some of the other products in this review provide. The layout designer is a bit cumbersome and didn't seem to provide a simple interface for extending your environment with new Beans, ActiveX, or whatever you happen to have for your Symbian device.

Figure 3 shows some of the major components available in the IDE, and as you can see, it does have the basics. The class browser is actually very nicely put together and easy to use. The file editor is straightforward, if pretty vanilla. The project manager is a bit perplexing because context menus don't always seem to work where expected and some items simply seem to be nonexistent. You can, however, open multiple projects simultaneously and swap back and forth between them--a cool feature, but it s pretty rare to need to work on two projects simultaneously.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

All in all, while CodeWarrior delivers the basics; it's just not too interesting or sexy doing it. That said, CodeWarrior is still the only game in town for some of the environments you might need to develop for. If you've got to deliver in multiple environments, I'd probably still start at Metrowerks to see if it has my environments covered, and then maybe look for something with some of the bells and whistles I really like (personally, for example, I'm addicted to code completion). All in all, CodeWarrior is a simple and adequate tool, if a bit limited and sometimes cumbersome.

Borland BuilderX and JBuilderX

http://www.borland.com $1,000 for C++ BuilderX, $400 for JBuilder

Borland has created a certain consistency of quality all the years I've used their tools, and the tools in this roundup don't disappoint. I looked at two versions: Borland C++ BuilderX 1.5 Mobile Edition and Borland JBuilderX Mobile Edition. Both these products are easy to install (even if it does take a while-admittedly, partly due to the Symbian SDKs that come as part of the installation), and both performed well.

Although it's been a while since I used the Borland C++ tools, the workspace environment still feels comfortable and familiar. The C++ edition also includes integrated design tools (the Together designer), integrated interfaces to source management (you can choose from a wide variety of source management tools), as well as all the standard project management, code editing, integrated debugging, and resource manipulation. In addition, the editor offers an extremely convenient new capability I'm happy to say I'm seeing in more and more editors: the ability to collapse lines of code to make viewing the structure of the code easier (figure 4). This is an extremely handy capability.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

The Java version of the BorlandX tool is similar to the JBuilder tool with which you might already be familiar. Here again, a pane-centric workspace orientation to the development environment carries through from the full JBuilder product. In addition, integrated source control hooks, integrated debugging, collapsible code, full references to the JDK on your machine, tabbed access to design and source views of code, as well as automatic identification and integration of a number of SDKs (it found my Symbian SDK automatically during the installation) make this a powerful lava toolset (figure 5). The version 1 used for this roundup also supports MIDP 2.0 along with the J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.0_01. I found the refactoring capability to be an interesting, if possibly overly complex, tool for refitting code. (Refactoring is the process of taking an existing piece of code and reworking it under the covers without changing what the user sees or how they interact with it.) JBuilderX has a variety of tools for identifying elements to refactor and tracking them through the entire project.

Both of these tools from Borland have carefully thought-out color coding of your source code and a variety of useful support and help tools. In general, these tools have gained immeasurably from their full featured counterparts.

J2ME Wireless Toolkit http://java.sun.com Free

Although all the tools I've evaluated so far are complete IDEs, no roundup of mobile development tools would be complete without at least a brief look at the lava 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) Wireless Toolkit.

This is a free implementation of the J2ME environment available from the lava Web site at http://java.sun.com. If you aren't familiar with it, J2ME is the portion of the lava platform specifically oriented toward developing applications for small-footprint devices such as cell phones and PDAs. It's based on a subset of the lava 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) APIs with certain limitations. Essentially, a base set of APIs was chosen for two primary Configurations: Connected Device Configuration (CDC) and Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC). On top of these are profiles, the most used of which is Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP). If your phone is Java-enabled, it's probably running MIDP.

The toolkit itself comes with a variety of tools for allowing you to build and test J2ME applications. It's very MIDP-centric, although ostensibly you could build both other CLDC profile-compliant and CDC-compliant applications. For a list of the tools included in the toolkit, subscribers can read an extended version of this article online at http://Advisor.com /doc/14493.

In addition to the primary tools, which are all available from your Windows start menu, there are several command-line utilities that provide additional capabilities such as JAR creation, creation of code stubs, certificate management, etc. (figure 6).

Installation of the Toolkit is straightforward and well documented. The caveat is that it assumes and enforces a specific directory structure for your J2ME projects. Fortunately, the directory, structure is well thought out and has saved me a couple of times in the past from not structuring my MIDLet Suite appropriately.

As with most of the tools I evaluated, WTK generates the appropriate distributables for your application. It doesn't have an integrated debugger, but it does let you connect to an IDE debugger if you choose. This capability, however, is pretty limited and difficult to use. All in all, the WTK is well worth the price (hey, it's free after all!) and the time you'll spend learning how to use it. For a first project, or for just for a quick and dirty demo, the J2ME Wireless Toolkit delivers.

Qualcomm BREW SDK http://www.qualcomm.com Free

As this article has moved along, I've gradually gotten further from full IDE environments, and now I'm on the far end of the spectrum. Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) is a standard for creating applications to run on wireless devices. The main proponent for BREW is Qualcomm, which has the largest number of BREW-compliant devices. It is a thin and fast environment that provides hooks to do some really cool things on BREW-enabled devices (for example, hooking your application to the integrated GPS capabilities of some phones).

The BREW SDK is how you develop applications for BREW. It isn't an IDE. It provides some general development and debugging tools, sample applications (with source!), an emulator, reference materials, and user guides (figure 7). The IDE works best with Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 for C/C++. I tried using the samples in the .NET environment, but it was missing some of the new files required for project management there. You can certainly convert them over, but it will take some effort.

Installation is simple, and in addition to the SDK libraries, several other tools and utilities get installed. For a list of these tools, subscribers can read an extended version of this article online at http://Advisor.com/doc/14494.

All in all, the BREW SDK is a very complete toolset for building and delivering BREW-enabled applications. Don't take this one lightly though. There's a lot to doing a good BREW application. Start by downloading the free SDK from the BREW home site at http://brew.qualcomm.com/brew/en/. This will give you links to all the tools and support you'll need. BREW is more actively used outside the US than in, although it is gaining momentum.

Time to go mobile!

Well, there you have it; seven tools all designed for, or at least focused on, developing for a mobile environment. Can you use them to make that turkey dinner in a cube like we talked about at the beginning of this article? Maybe not, but they'll get you started developing cutting-edge functionality for those cube-sized mobile devices.

MOBILE BUSINESS BENEFITS

Developers of mobile applications have a formidable task on their hands: Create applications for users who are used to large screens, eye-catching multi-media features, and lots of memory--but do it on devices that fit in the palm of your hand. Here are the tools to get you started.

Larry Whipple is the CTO for Tarallax Wireless, Inc. where he is guiding the development of new and innovative technologies in the areas of intelligent sensor networks. He has been a developer, trainer, and author since the early 1980s in various IT technologies. Larry has developed on numerous and varied platforms using a variety of tools and languages ranging from IBM mainframes to Verifone POS terminals. He was a senior technical architect and director of the Media and Entertainment group at Silverline Technologies, Ltd. He has developed numerous Java-based Web applications including those used at the award-winning vw.com Web site and a merchandising Web site for the recent animated blockbuster TitanAE. He has a patent-pending on an innovative electronic payment product and co-authored Building an Intelligent e-Business (January 2001).