The wireless devices such as cell phones keep their
owners connected to the outside world at anytime from
anywhere. They offer great connectivity that other types
of devices couldn’t offer. Application development for
these wireless devices is going to be in great demand for
the next couple years. Network programming plays an
important role in wireless application development to take
advantage of the connectivity these devices have to offer.
Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) offers a great development
platform for developing applications for the embedded
electronics and mobile devices. In Java 2 Micro Edition
(J2ME), the Connected Limited Device Configuration
(CLDC) defines a generic "configuration" for a broad
range of handheld devices. On top of CLDC, the Mobile
Information Device Profile (MIDP) is defined specifically
for wireless devices such as cell phones and two-way
pagers. Wireless device manufacturers need to implement
MIDP in order to support Java applications on their
devices. A user with a Personal Computer connected
with the Internet reads the Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML) content of a web page using some HTMLbrowser.
But a small wireless device uses a WMLbrowser
(micro-browser to render the Wireless Markup
Language (WML) content of a WML page. The web
browser cannot render the contents of WML page and in
the same way the micro-browser cannot render the
contents of an HTML page.