Project Background
Mobility is one of the most invigorating features, having an enormous impact of how communication is evolving into the future. It is estimated that there are over two billion mobile subscribers worldwide and that this figure is projected to grow close to four billion by 2010, which is 50% of the world’s population. As voice becomes less of a deterministic factor in reducing customer churn, mobile operators are now looking to mobile data services to differentiate themselves from their competitors and at the same time, generate substantial revenue in order to maintain or increase their market share. This has led to the advancement of mobile data services ranging from simple text messaging to complex e-commerce services. However, the right development tools are required to ensure the rapid and efficient creation, deployment, and management of these mobile data services.
This project offers a feature-by-feature analysis and comparison of the well-established Java Micro Edition (JME) and the emerging Adobe Flash Lite mobile development environments. The results obtained show various strengths and weaknesses of the two environments enabling trade-offs to be made when developing specific mobile data services. JME currently provides more control and functionality over mobile applications through it numerous APIs, whereas Flash Lite allows for the efficient and rapid creation of mobile applications with rich graphical user interfaces.
Conclusions
Generally, JME provides more control and functionality through its numerous APIs whereas Flash Lite allows for the rapid creation of applications with rich GUIs. These comparisons inevitably enable developers to determine which development platform best suites the creation of a particular mobile data service.