Converting JavaME applications to the Android platform (revisited)

It's been a year since I posted tutorial how to automatically convert Java ME MIDlets to Android platform. Since then, a lot of work has been done to make this tool even better and support more and more different Java ME applications and games. I've got a lot of positive feedback as well which also helped improving quality of this project.

Now, it is much simpler to set up MIDlet details, since only jad location and resulting apk package file name is necessary to provide in configuration.

For this demonstration procedure, I took a popular Java ME game 5ud0ku.






Required third party software:
- Java SE JDK (http://java.sun.com/javase/)
- Subversion client (http://subversion.tigris.org)
- Maven http://maven.apache.org/
- Ant (http://ant.apache.org/)
- Android SDK version 1.5 or later (http://developer.android.com/)
- ASM (http://asm.ow2.org/)

1. Check out MicroEmulator from Subversion repository (revision 2211)

svn co http://microemu.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/microemulator microemulator -r 2211

2. Build MicroEmulator project using Maven

cd microemulator
mvn

3. Make sure that the following properties in microemu-android/build.xml correctly point to the Android SDK and ASM jar file

<property name="sdk-folder" value="\java\android-sdk-windows"/>
<property name="asm.jar" value="\java\asm-3.2\lib\asm-3.2.jar"/>

4. Configure properties for 5ud0ku game, edit microemu-android/build.xml file (before you have to download 5ud0ku.jad and 5ud0ku.jar files to the same folder)

<property name="midlet.jad" value="\java\5ud0ku.jad"/>
<property name="midlet.package" value="5ud0ku.apk"/>

5. Create Android apk package with Ant

cd microemu-android
ant

6. And finally deploy microemu-android/bin/5ud0ku.apk either on emulator or device. For all of you who don't want to go through this somehow long procedure, here it is already prepared 5ud0ku.apk package.

Project hosting migrated to Google Code

I've been planning to do this for a long time, but finally got motivated enough to move on. Subversion repository is so slow these days on the SourceForge, not mention the really bad usability of the web site. That's a bit sad, because 8 years ago when MicroEmulator has started, SourceForge was a great place to host an open source project. SourceForge has not evaluated much since then, mostly reworking only web UI. In a meanwhile many alternatives has appeared and I finally decided to go with Google Code. It is simple, popular, has fast Subversion repository access.

MicroEmulator project is hosted now at the http://code.google.com/p/microemu/. New SVN URL is https://microemu.googlecode.com/svn.

Unfortunately, a fresh checkout of working copy is needed for existing working copies that are linked to SourceForge SVN repository.

To checkout microemulator trunk working copy use:

svn checkout http://microemu.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/microemulator microemulator