This is an advanced survey, for experienced developers who are interested in developing applications for mobile devices with limited processor and memory resources. The book covers Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) best practices and limitations, design patterns, and commercial solutions.

The author claims that the target audience includes managers and entrepreneurs, as well as experienced Java developers and mobile developers. Unless these managers and entrepreneurs are very technical people, I don’t think this assertion is correct. First and foremost, this book is suited for developers who are well versed in Java technology, including the fundamentals of J2ME, mobile information device profile (MIDP) basics, and related development tools. To be fair, the book includes an MIDP guide as an appendix, but this will not be sufficient for people who are not familiar with the technology. However, the Sun Web site does provide excellent materials to get you going.

In order to be significantly useful for experienced programmers, the book naturally focuses on server-side Java. Beginners may not be familiar with server-side programming; to benefit from the book, the reader should be familiar with concepts and techniques related to Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), servlets, Java database connectivity (JDBC), Java messaging service (JMS), and Java XML processing. If readers have this background, even in a limited sense, they will be richly rewarded by going though the examples in this book. I like the fact that the author was able to put together, in an integrated fashion, separate technologies to introduce key notions and techniques for developing mobile applications for enterprises.

The title of the book is very fitting; it precisely expresses the intention of the book. This book will help the reader to rapidly develop skills for enterprise solutions with mobile devices. These devices typically are personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, integrated personal entertainment/assistant devices, numerous special purpose set-top boxes, and, to some extent, Internet appliances. In the fast-paced Internet age, no programming language and development environment can be used in isolation. This is truer for programming environments such as J2ME, which address rapidly changing technologies and systems.

The material in this book is logically organized into six parts, two appendices, and an index. The appendices are on J2ME basic application development and tools, and J2ME runtimes for PDAs. The book has two associated Web sites (http://www.enterprisej2me.com/book/code and http://authors.phptr.com/yuan/), covering many applications, which can be downloaded. These Web sites also include many more helpful hints and leads for mobile developers. I liked many of the examples, such as “a simple client for [the] Google Web services API.”

The first part of the book is composed of two short sections on mobile commerce and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and is about 25 pages long. Parts 2, 3, and 4 cover end-to-end enterprise applications, mobile messaging applications, and mobile databases and synchronization engines, respectively. These parts constitute the bulk of the book, and are technically its strongest aspect. Part 2 is organized into five sections, including ones on the smart client paradigm and mobile design patterns, in the context of end-to-end enterprise applications. Part 3 is about mobile messaging applications, covering enterprise messaging (such as IBM’s Websphere-WMQe), and peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging (such as WMA) in addition to some basics (such as email and personal information management (PIM)). Part 4 covers mobile databases and synchronization engines. Many technologies and commercial products are introduced in these parts. Some of these products are Blackberry, Nokia, Oracle9i Lite, and IBM DB2 Everyplace.

Part 5 is about Extensible Markup Language (XML) and mobile Web services. For complete mastery, these subjects require at least another book (of about the same length as this book). The author, however, does an excellent job, in a limited to space, introducing these intricately intertwined concepts and technologies through the clever use of a case study on mobile clients for location-based services. Part 6 is on mobile security, and covers J2ME crypto recipes, as well as basic enterprise security elements.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to Java programmers who are interested in moving to mobile applications. Others will have to do some homework before enjoying many of the interesting elements of the book. I have been using J2EE and related technologies in my graduate classes since 1998, to introduce the component-based enterprise software development paradigm. I have had a very positive experience teaching component-based development with J2EE and J2ME in my advanced software engineering classes. I also recommend this book to software engineering teachers and professors, since they can teach many of the future paradigms and development strategies using the techniques and examples presented in this book.