Going Native

Mobile game development is all about J2ME, right. Well no, BREW in the US is providing a quality level that is simply impossible on Java and with Flash on its way the competition is getting hotter. This is not to mention mophun, exen and other exotic flavors of mobile development.

J2ME was specifically created for mobile and its biggest USP was to provide a virtual machine which would get away from the horrible issues of device compatibility over so many different handsets. The fact that BREW which is a native development environment is seen as considerably more cross platform and compatible than J2ME shows just how bad J2ME has been in it's biggest USP. When you also consider you are taking a four fold performance hit when using J2ME against BREW on the same handset you can see why there is a push to look for an alternative.

There appears to be two new kids on the block trying to steal the Java crown. OpenKODE is an implementation of a native environment on non BREW handsets. This provides all the performance of native code, but time will tell if the amazing compatibility that we have seen on BREW is maintainable outside of the single chip supplier world of BREW.

The other route is Flash which looses some of performance and functionality of J2ME but aims to provide a completely transferable solution with no porting required. This holy grail of mobile development where over half the development costs are sunk in endless porting relies on both simpler functionality and a vector based graphics system which should allow games to auto scale across the wide range of screen resolution. J2ME never took the screen resolution issue into account meaning that getting the game to work across all the various handset resolutions has been one of the biggest compatibility issues.

Both of these solutions look very appealing for different reasons (and products). A cross platform native environment with an easy route to porting to BREW would allow the development of some high end arcade style apps and allow 3D to really take off on mobile.

On the other hand Flash with it's low development costs and zero porting would allow the casual games, which are so successful on mobile today, to be made even easier to develop and for more simple style games to become viable.

There is also talk of BREW breaking out of the US confines and becoming much more widely available partly due to the move into 3G. The market for alternatives to J2ME is therefore becoming crowded.

One of the key aspects of compatibility which J2ME has failed is the certification of the implementation on handsets. BREW because it is linked to the chipset manufacturer is a very reliable and consistent platform. J2ME isn’t, the number of handsets which report the wrong screen resolution in J2ME or have functions that either don’t work or work differently than other implementations is staggering.

The question then is what happens to J2ME; suddenly it starts to look like the ugly duckling. It needs to carve itself a niche or it will die in a market that it has created.