Comment by fidotron

J2ME/MIDP was a fun platform to really cut your teeth on, and performed far better than many like to claim. For example, an old colleague of mine had written a Java emulator of a Game Gear, and it ran very well on J2ME, yet Android was horrific. Curiously the MIDP implementations out of Sun were also awful, and it was Nokia and some other European VM providers that did way better.

By far the most annoying aspect of J2ME were the jar size limits at the lower end, meaning to squeeze every byte (and this was real) you had to reduce the number of classes in the jar. Around 4-5 was typical. For many of the games on that page you'd be looking at 1 class of about 30000 lines, and a few others for device type specific abstractions, for example, maybe Sprite routines using Nokia DirectGraphics. This made teamwork on these games an absolute nightmare, especially in a pre-Git source code management era. (CVS/SVN/P4 were not exactly designed for working like that).

Later on there were some incredibly good studio specific optimization tools that handled transformations automatically, and outperformed humans, but these came into play exactly as iOS absolutely exploded.

They mention Mascot Capsule, which was a reasonably successful proprietary 3D engine pre-bundled on some devices. The other was the "standard" JSR 184, and I worked with at least two separate dev studios that had each implemented that in OpenGLES/C++ so that porting their 3D titles from J2ME to iOS/Brew could be reduced to an almost copy/paste business. This lasted maybe about two years before bothering with J2ME output was abandoned, but a side effect is the scene graphs for a lot of old iOS "premium" games look a lot like the one in JSR 184.