Java Wireless module development - java

I am by no means a Java expert (not really intermediate either) but i can write enough to get me by. At work we are looking a Cinterion TC65 wireless module which runs embedded Java with a 2G sim card for network connections. I have never done Java mobile dev so the whole startApp(), pauseApp(), destryApp() is throwing me slightly. What i need to know is if its possible to include normal Java code, ie. Mysql Connections, HTTP connections? Or does it all have to be done over AT commands? I need some Java buffs to help me out on this one :) Thanks

Currently there are various UI framework available for J2ME app development
lcdui
lwuit
kuix
If you want simple UI then go for lcdui , It also comes with Netbeans designer so you don;t need to much worry about designing form and flow of application.
You can't have mysql connection directly from j2me application, for that you need to port your webservices accessing your DB and you can call your webservices. you can also make URLConnections.

The TC65 and later modules such as TC65i, BGS5, EHS6, ELS61-E all run Java ME 3.2 so you can write normal Java. But you do have to write with a reduced J2ME 3.2 feature set, you cannot use newer features of Java 7 or 8 for example.
The two development environments you can use are Eclipse Juno and Netbeans 7. These come supplied on an installation "CDROM" download.
These two links show how to get started with either Eclipse or Netbeans on a current module such as BGS5 or EHS6. The simple tutorial re-uses an beginner's example from a Java text book:
Eclipse - https://developer.gemalto.com/tutorial/starting-out-java-me-volcano-robot-project-eclipse-juno
Netbeans - https://developer.gemalto.com/tutorial/starting-out-java-me-volcano-robot-project-netbeans-72
There are further examples of using HTTP connections on the developer website:
String connProfile = "bearer_type=gprs;access_point=internet;username=;password=";
http = (HttpConnection) Connector.open(url + ";" + connProfile);
You can also use the module's Internet Services via AT Commands, but there is no need as most functions have Java APIs associated with them.

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Running a Java Program from a Browser without Plugins

Some weeks ago I wrote a little Java program showing a real time plot chart (i.e. records with tracking of current time), with a modest 25 kbps streaming rate, 20fps framing rate, and no relevant user interaction. Thinking on its eventual deployment as a Mobile App, a Web Server chart or simply as a PC as a program, being Java a perfect selection for me.
Before starting now the Web version of this program, i started to investigate and according the 2016 Oracle White Paper Migrating from Java Applets to Plugin Free Java Technologies:
The deprecated plugin technology will be completely removed from the
Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in a
future Java release (TBD). Java Web Start applications do not rely on a
browser plugin and will not be affected by these changes.
And according 2019 OpenWebStart:
Java Web Start (JWS) was deprecated in Java 9, and starting with Java
11, Oracle removed JWS from their JDK distributions
And then I get lost.
Hence, which is the way to go with a Java program like this? Which is the proper sustainable Java way to do this (and not subject to something like what happened to Java Web Start)?.
Or should I simply move to another way to do it, now that the program is in its infancy, considering I am not precisely a fan of Phyton, considering PHP is not precisely the way for programming these kind of numerical things, and considering I am not so willing to give Microsoft technologies a chance?
It is not a problem for me to adapt and rewrite my current code if necessary, but possibly not doing this every 5 years.
Which article would you recommend me to get back to the proper path?
Thanks in advance.
The easiest and highest-performance option is TeaVM, a transpiler that converts Java classes into JavaScript. Your code then runs in the browser natively without any plugin.
Read an introductory article here: https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/java-in-the-browser-with-teavm
TeaVM's main site is here: http://teavm.org/
Thinking on its eventual deployment as a Mobile App, a Web Server
chart or simply as a PC as a program, being Java a perfect selection
for me.
(..)
Hence, which is the way to go with a Java program like this? Which is
the proper sustainable Java way to do this (and not subject to
something like what happened to Java Web Start)?
Two lines of Java
What happened is that our old friend, the Java Standard Edition, split into two lines:
Oracle Java SE ("commercial Java"): needs paid license for commercial use for releases since April 16th, 2019
OpenJDK ("open source Java"): open source (GPLv2 with linking exception), does not contain Oracle's Java Web Start implementation
The Oracle Java SE version keeps Java Web Start and Java FX available and supported only for Java SE 8. Newer Java versions, esp. Java SE 11 do not carry these anymore.
It is not a complete client / desktop technology removal, because Oracle, according to the Java Client Roadmap Update 2018, continues to support AWT and Swing for at least 5 more years on both Java SE 8 and Java SE 11.
You can continue deployment via Java Web Start
Open source Java got a decent implementation of Java Web Start, which is free and available for Java SE 8 and newer Java versions like Java SE 11.
This is Karakun's OpenWebStart based on Red Hat's IcedTea-Web, now beyond version 1.0, which you already found.
Continued support is not guaranteed but seems likely. So you might continue on this track.
Or you might deploy via an app store
Oracle's explanation for dropping Java Web Start was, that they want to change the deployment model to applications with bundled runtime:
As client application development continues to shift from the old
“plugin” world to modern deployment, the need for a standalone Java
Runtime Environment (JRE) that is installed centrally, separately from
Java applications has diminished. Using the ‘jlink’ tool introduced
with JDK 9 will make it even easier for application developers to
package and deploy dedicated runtimes rather than relying on a
pre-installed system JRE.
(Source: Faster and Easier Use and Redistribution of Java SE)
Deployment, according to Oracle, would occur via some app store like the iTunes Store:
No doubt this was true, but the OSes have shifted hard and fast away
from this model. The "app store" model is now it. macOS has been
ratcheting this down hard for several years now. MSFT -- even in the
enterprise market -- has signaled this direction as well. For sure we
need to find options to support the legacy, but the future here is limited.
(Source: OpenJDK discussion mailing list)
Note that Java Start Web Start handled the updating of available new versions of applications on the client machines, and so do typical app stores.
Of course you can serve a version of your app with bundled runtime on your web site, but then you usually have to implement some mechanism to handle updates of your application on the machines of your users yourself.
What to choose?
It is true that the separate JRE installation has disadvantages, e.g. I changed my JRE recently and suddenly the IDE for Java did not work anymore. :-)
Moving deployment from a web site you control to an app store controled by the OS vendor or mighty players like Valve, has its own challenges. E.g. access restrictions, fees, release delays because of the review process, or they might not like your app for some reason and will not publish it.
Then adoption: Personally I have seen private use of app stores mostly on mobile devices and macs, but no use in companies yet. This might be a factor in your decision which road to pursue.
I've missed the Java on browser too. Because of curiosity I just developed an "JVM-Server", which precompiles the Java-Classes to native JavaScript and serves them to a WebBrowser.
Look here is a Hello World example application which is running on Browser:
https://github.com/neo-expert/jsjvm_helloworld
There is also a Library which implements WebGL bindings. In the above Example is a WebGL demo included, where a 3D cube will be rendered. The code is written in pure Java.
Is it a swing app? Will have to map that to a web (html) app to make it work on a browser nowadays.
You cannot run any of those programs from a browser directly.
Java used to java applets and java web start - where the browser helped you install a java app on local system but user had to seperately have installed JRE (Java run time) to run it locally.
Now all we have are web apps. basically apps that might have a a session, login, authenticaiton and authorition but in the end the app outputs HTML, Javascript, images and text data (JSON. XML etc) that is rendered on the web page.
Look at J2EE. I'm a java fan. but it takes longer to develop, but i think it runs better. Especially with a good framework like Spring Boot (it includes MVC see https://dzone.com/articles/7-best-java-frameworks-for-2016)
But learning curve is there. Buy a book or do a course online like udemy or similar.youtube has free videos. but not sure of the order/ quality.
If you choose php - many free and cheap servers like x10hosting to start with and learning curve is less too. Good framework - packages like drupal and wordpress.
On the browser HTML, Javacript run. There are frameworks for this too. Like gogole's angular https://angular.io/ this too needs a book/seperate study. Old days we used to use simple Javascript ...
For mobiles - sometimes can get away with using a URL OR there are frameworks that wrap a web page in an 'app' for android, iphone etc OR make a native app - but then will have different code bases.
I know someone who used a game engine to make a mostly single code base (some classes are specific to each platform like android, iphone) but used to render business graphs and a few interaction use cases (about 40). He used https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/
As your research already revealed, Java is not a relevant web frontend technology anymore. Prefer Javascript and CSS for browser frontends, instead. Feed the frontend code with data served by Java backend services. The Java Servlet Specification is still the base for server-side Java. Many frameworks (like Spring or Jersey, to name a few) are build on top of it. Either chose one of these frameworks, or - for really simple use-cases - build an application only with plain servlets. Any servlet needs to be deployed in a servlet container (e.g. Apache Tomcat).
Your Java code needs probably some refactoring in order to provide an API for the web. As you are asking for near-realtime communication, you should have a look at the WebSockets standard which is designed for bidirectional and fast client-server-communication on the Internet and supported by all modern browsers (nice intro explaining the difference to WebRTC and arguing why WebSockets are often the better choice). To plot your data in a browser with Javascript and SVG, have a look on the D3.js library. A quick search brings you to demos like this one: D3 Real Time Chart. Also, there are other libraries that are built on top of D3, for example plotly.js.
Summary:
Java is fine for web backend services.
Your code needs refactoring to serve a backend API, preferably WebSockets. (introduction on how to start in Java at https://www.baeldung.com/java-websockets)
Get familiar with a Javascript browser plot library, such as D3.js.

Setting up MySQL and Apache for RESTful webservices

Can anybody point me in the right direction for instructions on setting up the following items on a Windows development PC?
Setup a MySQL database.
Setup an Apache webserver, a framework plus an IDE so that I can write RESTful APIs using Java and JSON.
I am using this to write a native Android and IOS mobile app that will store and retrieve data from the MySql database using the RESTful APIs on the Apache web server.
I have searched through several tech books, Google and Stack Overflow but cannot find anything that contains the above specific items. Within Stack Overflow, the following two links proved useful but do not give the specific items that I need. Android - Ruby on Rails - MySQL AND Best practice selecting database for mobile app
If you are planning to develop RESTful APIs using a Windows development PC, you could consider some of the available software bundles like XAMPP (https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html), which include an Apache distribution containing MariaDB (successor of MySQL, you can work with MariaDB as you would in MySQL), PHP (server-side language), and Perl (not neccesary) in a single Windows installer. Then, once you install it, you will have a complete web development environment up and running.
Then, considering that you develop your APIs using PHP as the server-side programming language (which I strongly recommend you as it is the most widely used language for this purpose), several additional decisions have to be taken, in terms of deciding about:
The IDE to develop in. When working with PHP, I recommend you PHPStorm IDE (https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm). The best in my humble opinion. However, quite complex and not very easy, but it completely worths learning.
The PHP framework. Unless you want to manually program your APIs (completely madness), you will have to use one of the many available PHP frameworks. In this case, I recommend you Laravel Framework (http://laravel.com). As far I have seen and worked, the best present and future option concerning PHP development. You could then install some RESTful API specific package in top of Laravel to speed up the development, like Dingo/API (https://github.com/dingo/api).
I insist this is just my recommendation, but you have to know that behind all that languages and frameworks there is a quite long and hard learning curve.
Good luck anyway!
1) To install MySQL on Windows refer to this official MySQL guide.
You will need to download and then extract the zip file (I would recommend the Community Edition). You will have all the details you need in the link above. Note that the .msi installer for Windows is no longer available for newer versions of MySQL.
2) Since you are going to use Java, you do not need the Apache web server (httpd) but you need Apache Tomcat as a servlet container (or other alternatives like Glassfish, JBoss as full Java EE application servers).
For building RESTful Web APIs in Java, Jersey is very good option (https://jersey.java.net).
Finally, as an IDE you can use anything, the most popular being Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA.

Which option is suitable to replace Java Applet?

I would like to replace Java Applet which currently needs to use client's resources, i.e. external readers, and to communicate with a server via socket.
Reason:
1. I have thousands of client machines using this Java Applet program, and most of them are running out-dated JRE. When the Java Applet program is updated / added new features, all client machines will need updating the latest JRE.
Expected Solution:
The Java Applet program would be expected to be replaced by a web-based application, which allows to compile and run source code at client's side such that the new web-based application could still use client's resources and communicate with server via socket.
Can I use JavaScript to achieve it?
I would very appreciate your help/suggestion for this problem. Thank you!
JavaScript is a scripting language that gets evaluated in the browser.
I would not describe it as compiling and running but yes, it does mean you can run code in the client and is commonly used to create applications that run in the browser.
There's a staggering amount of frameworks that you can use to write your application. Take a look at the TodoMVC site to see the same TODO app created using several different frameworks.
If you come from Java applets, GWT may be interesting to look at.
If you wish to let the JavaScript client listen for messages from the server, take a look at websockets.
The smart card reader is going to be a problem, though!
See Architectures to access Smart Card from a generic browser? Or: How to bridge the gap from browser to PC/SC stack?
By the way:
The real issue with outdated JREs is not that your code will not run on old JREs, you can create perfectly fine applets using java 1.4 or java 5. Any libraries you may need you can deploy alongside your applet. The pain is a security problem. Anything but the latest version Java plugin is getting actively exploited and puts the user at risk. Occasionally, even the latest version is not safe.
try socket.io
I think this is the latest technology you can use to communicate with client browsers. it support the latest browsers and mobile browsers too.
hope this will help you.
Javascript has become very powerful with HTML 5.0. Here is a list of new elements that you can use to access all kinds of resources, including local files, audio, video, GPU rendering (canvas + WebGL) and GPU compute (WebCL). Here are even more things you can do, including database connections and networking. You can even create offline Javascript applications.
jQuery and jQuery layout make robust GUI development a lot easier. Rich tool suites, such as Google Closure offer optimization and a compiler for improving performance and detecting obvious mistakes early in the development process.
W3 offers useful stats for making an informed decision on how many users on average have access to which features. Note that the most annoying guy in that list arguably is IE8 due to it's lack of proper HTML 5.0 support.
In case you want to stick with Java, then one alternative would be to use my http://bck2brwsr.apidesign.org project. It's goal is to create small Java that can run in 100% of modern browsers without any plugin installed.
There are Java bindings to HTML (via knockout - one of the four most popular frameworks for HTML5) and that is why one can code whole business logic in Java and just render it via HTML. Should be enough to replace most of the applet UI.
In addition to that there is an experimental API to render on HTML canvas. People use it to write Java games that run in a pure browser.
There is a simple way to communicate with server via JSON REST API or via WebSockets. A live example is here.

Write Windows Phone 8 app using Java API?

I am looking to develop a Windows Phone 8 application based on a Java API but I'm not sure how to proceed. The developer of the original java application said he doesn't have enough demand for a WP8 version, so all that's available is the API. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience in interoperability of these two.
How can I call the java functions from WP8? My guess is that I must have a server in the middle to make the connection?
Thank you
The only way this would work is if you create a web service on top of the Java API (I assume its a library you're referring to). Then have the WP8 app call the web service. There should be plenty of pages online showing you how to consume web services from WP

How to take a Java Web-application offline?

We develop Java Web-aps (Websphere, DB2) which display graphical and databased information. We would also like to offer the same application offline (distribution via CD/DVD) with online data-update. We have tried a number of alternatives in the past, but nothing has been really stable. What are the new best practices to take a Web ap plus data (in a small database) offline?
I don't know how well it works with the CD/DVD distribution front, but the first thing that comes to mind is Gears. On the .NET side of the fence there's Silverlight 2. Then there's the Mozilla Prism project, although I don't know how far advanced that is.
These are all designed for not just offline access, but mixed offline/online, talking to a server when it's available and working locally when necessary.
I'd suggest using Apache Derby as the database (also available as Sun's Java DB, and possibly still IBM Cloudscape (does that still have DB2 compatibility in place?)).
I'm sure there's plenty of Web servers/Servlet containers about. Apache Tomcat is the obvious one. An alternative approach would be to use an embedded native browser within a single Java process. That approach should be relatively hassle free for users and tech support, and you can just use WebStart to install and update.
If you're using EJBs and other nonsense, then there are similar freebies about. I understand Sun Glassfish is nice and fast starting.
You could create an image of your server as a VMware instance and distribute it with a copy of VMware player (licensing allowing of course). Personally I'd build it on top of a Linux distribution like CentOS5.
You can bundle a JRE along with JETTY server and use a different database e.g HSQLDB (that you can bundle inside the webapp itself).
If you are using an ORM tool to connect to database, you might not have to make many code changes for this.
A lot of Application server distribute their admin consoles like this.For e.g Weblogic admin console runs offline (it uses internal ldap server for its database)
Also as far as Google gears is concerned, they are also pretty much doing the same thing.
They have a server that is bundled along with SQLDB and they allow to synchronize the data between online offline app.
You can sync the data too (use webservices in the online app) and talk over https from the offline app to sync the data, if you need the sync feature.
Also you can check this link
http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2007/pdf/TS-69700.pdf

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