Comment by usr1106

Comment by usr1106 a day ago

15 replies

View on Hacker News

J2ME is an unprecise term. I'd guess they mean J2ME/MIDP. The other profiles did even fly less probably.

I remember from the early 2000s you could get railway time tables from the German railways for your selected pair of stations as a midlet. That was truly useful.

I also used a mobile browser frontend. The data was rendered by the backend and transferred in compressed form. That was very usable at 2G speeds. Of course JavaScript was rare at the time. But I don't think the product was any commercial success.

Of cause their were (mostly toy) games. But in general the technology was probably 10+ years too early for the market.

lxgr 17 hours ago

> J2ME is an unprecise term. I'd guess they mean J2ME/MIDP. The other profiles did even fly less probably.

Java’s attempt to make the GNU/Linux terminology nitpicking portable? ;)

Wasn’t there also CLDC, CDC etc.? I could never figure out what the hierarchy there was – was MIDP above or below C(L)DC?

All devices I ever encountered were of the MIDP and CLDC type, in any case.

Reply View 1 reply
  • usr1106 12 hours ago

    Right those existed, too.

    I think bottom up it's Java, J2ME, CLDC, MIDP.

    So the programmer really works with MIDP.

    I vaguely remember PP (Personal Profile IIRC). That was probably CDC/PP. Nokia either put it into one of the communicators or at least intended to so. 9210 I'd guess. But apps were extremely rare.

    Reply View 0 replies
thomond 21 hours ago

Was this Opera Mini? I remember installing that on my Nokia many years ago. It used compression as well. https://www.coderanch.com/t/229735/Opera-Mini-browser

Reply View 10 replies
  • throwaway04324 16 hours ago

    I think Opera Mini did much more than compression.

    I seem to remember them actually rewriting (rendering?) the web page server side, and then sending an optimized mobile friendly version to make it more readable for pages that were originally designed for desktop.

    It worked great on my phone and I even used it when the phones were more cabable, because web pages looked better and it saved a lot of bandwidth.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • lxgr 15 hours ago

      They rendered the site server-side (including JavaScript execution for a couple of seconds and all) and then sent the rendered page in some binary markup language to the client, with images heavily compressed.

      I actually still sometimes use it on iOS! The app is no longer available in most (all?) App Store regions, but I still have it on my account and can redownload it. The servers seem to still be there!

      Reply View 1 reply
      • [removed] 15 hours ago
        [deleted]
        Reply View 0 replies
  • usr1106 12 hours ago

    No, it was another company, I don't think a well-known name.

    Opera Mini still works today on S60 phones from 2006ish. I regularly see web server log entries from a relative on my private server. But I believe it's a native Symbian app (.sis) not a Midlet. (I have working phones, but I don't have Opera Mini, so I cannot verify)

    Reply View 2 replies
    • lysace 10 hours ago

      Perhaps Reqwireless? Acquihired by Google to work on the WAP dead-end iirc, when then they were figuring out how to deal with mobile.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • usr1106 7 hours ago

        Reqwireless I have certainly heard. Don't remember in which context. If you tell me they had this "browser frontend" midlet, it's probably the one I used. 2002ish I would guess.

        Reply View 0 replies
  • dbtablesorrows 20 hours ago

    IIRC, other browsers (the chinese UC browser and Nokia's OVI browser) had compression too. But opera was most popular (and perhaps most mature as well).

    Reply View 2 replies
    • dfox 17 hours ago

      Compression is inherent feture of WAP and some WAP browsers could use the WAP infrastructure to transfer not only WML, but also well-formed XHTML.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • lxgr 12 hours ago

        Opera Mini went way beyond just compression. It effectively rendered the website server-side and then sent optimized markup to the client (so it's much closer to "print site to SVG" on the server than "Content-encoding: gzip").

        Reply View 0 replies
  • 71bw 19 hours ago

    It still does! Ancient versions still work absolutely fine on old phones.

    Reply View 0 replies
dfox 17 hours ago

> Of course JavaScript was rare at the time.

IIRC for WAP the only way to use form elements was JavaScript as there was no equivalent of HTML <form> that would just submit the request automatically.

Reply View 1 reply
  • [removed] 16 hours ago
    [deleted]
    Reply View 0 replies