J2ME for Multiplayer Mobile Games

A JavaWorld article as an introduction to the use of J2ME as multiplayer mobile games platform. Mobile games present a big paradigm shift from console games due to the vastly different target audience, lifestyle, and distribution models. A successful mobile game will likely have one of the following characteristics: easy to learn, interruptible, subscription based, rich social interactions, take advantage of mobile innovations. Michael Yuan also makes a survey of APIs and tools for user interfaces, network and backend integration, data management, multimedia, security and provisioning (over-the-air (OTA) provisioning).