Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Antenna support for Java ME SDK 3.0

For building our Java ME application we use Antenna. It is a great tool, that makes automated builds possible and also works well as your regular build tool. But it lacks support for Java ME SDK 3.0 and other newer toolkits. Since we need that, I have made a contribution to the Antenna project, added as a patch yesterday.
If you want to try the modified verions, send me a mail and I will send you the jar.

How it works

A key property of your Antenna setup is the wtk.home property. It should point to the base directory of your WTK/Java ME SDK installation. Antenna uses this to detect which toolkit you are using. In the older version toolkits are hardcoded into Antenna sourcecode. In the new version textfiles are used to set up available toolkits and their properties. Antenna goes through a list of toolkits, described in the text file autodetect.txt, and checks if the unique files for that specific toolkit are available. If they are, the right toolkit have been found, and properties are loaded from a properties file.

This makes it easy to add a new toolkit or new properties for the existing one.

Supported toolkits

I have tested the new version with the following toolkits:
- SUN Java ME SDK 3.0
- Sun WTK 2.5.2
- MOTODEV SDK for Java ME v2
- Nokia S60_3rd_FP2_SDK_v1.1 (Symbian)
- SPRINT WTK 332
- Samsung_SDK_11 (autodetected as WTK 2.5.2)
- SonyEricsson WTK 2.5.2
- Nokia S40 5th Edition SDK Feature
Pack 1

I have also made some tests with Mpowerplayer, but the stub for CLDC 1.1 provided with Mpowerplayer seems not to match the specification. If I replace it with the one from Suns WTK 2.5.2 it seems OK. I have not tested Mpowerplayers preverifier, since it is Mac based and I use a Windows PC.

Antenna setup

Antenna properties are described here. They work as before, with the new feature that additional libraries can be defined dynamically, in the toolkit properties file, without any need for changes in Antenna source code. If I set up a property for a toolkit like this:

jsr999=lib/jsr999.jar

I can then turn it on in my ant file by setting the property wtk.jsr199.enabled to true. I can also turn on all defined additional libraries by setting property wtk.all.enabled to true. During development I used this, since Antenna checks that all jar files are available.

Adding a new Toolkit
You can add a new toolkit to antenna just by editing a text file and adding another. Do like this:
First you add a new line to the file autodetext.txt (in the res directory). It should look something like this:

#sony ericsson
sonyericwtk2;lib/semc_ext_jp8.jar;lib/cldcapi11.jar

Lines starting with # are comments. The lines defining toolkits should start with the toolkit property filename and then contain a list of files that are unique to this toolkit. File names should be relative to wtk.home.

Then you add a properties file, in this case sonyericwtk2.properties. It looks something like this:

name="Sony Ericsson WTK2"
include=wtk25
nokiaui=lib/nokiaext.jar
semc=lib/semc_ext_jp8.jar
vodafone=lib/vscl21.jar


The properties you could use are:

  • name: a descriptive name for the toolkit. Use this always.
  • preverifyversion: 1 means WTK 1 style, support only CLDC 1.0, 2 means WTK 2 style, include Target parameter in preverify command, 3 means WTK 3 style, only add parameter cldc1.0 if cldc 1.0 is used
  • emulator: exe or jar file for emulator
  • cldc10,cldc11: libraries for cldc versions
  • midp10,midp20,midp21: libraries for midp versions
  • include: include another toolkit definition. Useful if the toolkit is an add-on to another toolkit, like WTK 2.5 or Java ME SDK 3.0
All other properties will be taken for add-on libraries that will be added to classpath if wtk.[propertiy].enabled is true, or if wtk.all.enabled is true.

Please let me know if you have any problems or improvement suggestions.

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