IF you are considering offshore, you either need a) someone you really know and trust in the company – so perhaps start with small projects to build that trust, or – especially if business critical – b) ensure that you have someone representing the company spending time at the offshore company’s site, both pre-project to evaluate, and during the project on a regular basis.

Naturally, if the project is small, option b) could mean costs cancel out. But if the costs for the project are small, you are probably better off picking someone close that you can apply pressure on if needed.

I do think the cost advantage is only one aspect you need to evaluate offshore development for, and it should not be the only one. Increasingly, developing in India and Eastern Europe is now getting close to rates you will get in western markets, so you really need to pick a partner for their expertise and knowledge as well, where cost should only be one aspect.

thanks for the comment. Yeah it’s true that in the early J2ME days we all wanted things to move faster – but you need to note that there was virtually no rivals except BREW, which was limited to very specific markets. It’s a very different story now in 2010.

Regarding screen sizes, of course hardcoding is avoided. Yes, i am primarily referring to having to create new assets, but also changes in the layout design. Sometimes it is little things. For example a widget we recently built was designed for 480×854 Droid, with a standard 2×2 cell size and uses the layout-hdpi directory. Suddenly the Nexus One arrived with 480×800 screen and a slighlty different 2×2 standard cell size. This caused our widget to look slightly wrong on the Nexus One as opposed to Droid.

During the J2ME days, the complains were that things moved *too slow*. But now things are moving too fast?

True, APIs should be gracefully deprecated.

I’m surprised that with your experience developing since 2003 that you complain about screen sizes; are you hard-coding? Or are you referring to having to create new assets as new screen resolutions come out? Can’t wait for SVG…

ceo

I don’t want to be purely negative, but as you say “What we’d like to do is to not hold back. We’d like to discuss what really is going on”. The market reality to that sentence above is that J2ME is in around 3 billion+ devices, Android in a few million. Sure a big chunk of the 3 billion may be effectively unreachable, but that still leaves a vast potential userbase. And J2ME is in almost every new mobile handset sold, Android is in hardly any new devices sold (relatively). J2ME is becoming less and less fragmented, and is much better now than it used to be, while it sounds like Android is just becoming more fragmented at quite a pace, and with unpredictable runtime features (sounds familiar!) Of course it goes without saying Android is considerably more capable than J2ME, but I’m simply trying to correct your assertion above. And with Sun-supported efforts like LWUIT for J2ME which allows the creation of great UIs with one runtime on everything from big touchscreens to old phones, developing great J2ME software got a whole lot easier. And the Android store is apparently broken and not making devs any real money, meanwhile J2ME devs have the increasingly powerful GetJAR channels, and Nokia’s Ovi Store (over a million downloads a day now and counting).

As with all Google products it seems to fall into the category of throwing it out there, develop new features like crazy, and hope it sticks. I think they are failing to grasp the complexity of running an open system, with manufacturer specific implementations, and although I believe the potential is huge as well, they stand to risk losing the developer community which will if not spell certain death – will severely hinder or slow down their growth.

Besides the issues you point out, there are also issues in regards to marketing and promoting the apps: http://mobione.com.au/wordpress/?p=534. They seem to have solved the OS upgrade (but I am actually not sure if this is consistent on all manufacturers, but my G1 did automatically upgrade), but they really need to get their ducks in a row on multiple issues.