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I have to develop a Java ME (formerly known as J2ME) application that will take advantage of Bluetooth technology to communicate with other instances of itself on other mobile devices.

I know that both NetBeans and Eclipse offer an integrated environment to develop Java ME applications.

Which one is more mature and stable? Which one offers better tools?

My application has to communicate to many more devices running the same app and so I need to test my application with multiple instances of emulators running it and allowing these emulator instances to see each other via the Java ME Bluetooth APIs.

Will I be able to do this?

informatik01
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Andrea Zilio
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    eclipse people will tell you to use eclipse, netbeans people will tell you to use netbeans. then you will know as much as you know now :( – KevinDTimm Mar 30 '10 at 13:23
  • I'm confident it will not go this way :) – Andrea Zilio Mar 30 '10 at 13:25
  • One tool might have better J2ME integrations than the other. This can be measured pretty objectively depending on levels of support. – Stefan Kendall Mar 30 '10 at 13:26
  • i feel that eclipse is always better than netbeans – sreejith Mar 30 '10 at 13:42
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    Having worked on both Netbeans and Eclipse for mobile development (J2ME & Blackberry), I can definitely say in my experiences, Netbeans has been a lot more stable and every time I work with Eclipse I start grumbling about it crashing on me! – Jessica Brown Apr 01 '10 at 18:42
  • As a side note: the correct terminology is "Java ME" ([Java Platform, Micro Edition](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javame/about-java-me-395899.html)). J2ME became Java ME as of June 2005, because it does not have a version number ([source](http://www.java.com/en/about/javanaming.jsp)) – informatik01 Jan 19 '14 at 16:35

2 Answers2

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I've used both Eclipse and Netbeans in the past. For my final year project at university, I had to build a J2ME application which could communicate between several different mobile devices.

Netbeans has native J2ME integration, which I found more reassuring than having to use a third-party addon for Eclipse. Although I prefer Eclipse as an IDE, Netbeans was a lot easier to set up J2ME emulation etc. It allowed me to run several instances of the mobile device emulator and virtually communicate between them using Bluetooth.

You can also download and install various SDKs from phone manufacturers (Sony Ericsson etc) if you want to hook up their specific emulators to Netbeans.

Seb Charrot
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If you will be working with J2ME, Netbeans integration is an aspect to be considered to choose Netbeans over Eclipse for this particular programming needs.

JuanZe
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