Yesterday I finished a quick and pretty crappy prototype of a J2ME application for use by customers on their phones. After years of building server applications in which it is normal to have complete control (or at least full knowledge) of the software and hardware environment it was strange to be operating in a space in which the application will need to be tested on each type of handset before we can safely assume it will work.
It was even stranger to be operating in such a resource constrained environment as a phone. It feels a bit like programming under Windows 3.x - at any stage something could go wrong, and heaven forbid that you try to use too much RAM or expect that your application will be left alone to just do its thing.
All up it was fun and I’m looking forward finishing it off over the coming weeks. However, I’m not looking forward to the testing and problem solving when we find it doesn’t work on some phone or other (or worse it doesn’t work on some phone or other on a particular network).