Tira Jump, good or bad?

[Abuse]

Has anybody had any contact with Tira, and the Jump Product Suite?

What exactly does it do?
Is it just a corporation putting a name to common sense programming?
Or does it genuinely offer a productivity gain?

[Matzon]

I'm very sceptic! I browsed an online article that they refered to which posted the following:

1) Hard-coding for Fixed Screen Sizes
Hard-coding for fixed screen sizes severely limits portability. When working with drawing screen elements, make sure your splashscreens, sprites, and background images are dynamically adjustable to different screen sizes instead. For example, say you want to draw a size 10 pixel rectangle at the bottom right corner of the screen. Instead of this:

graphics.drawRect(118, 118, 10, 10);

Your code should look like this:

graphics.drawRect(getWidth() - 10, getHeight() 10, 10, 10);

Both will work on a Nokia 7210 but the former will not be portable.

Anyone having dealt with enough models will know that the above advice basically is invalid. The reason being that getWidth/getHeight is flawed on several devices, and cannot be used.

I'd imagine that their stuff would probably work fine for basic stuff.  But for our stuff (multiplayer games over internet) it just wont do.

[Abuse]

Interesting,
I hate to ask, but have you got any links to any of their material?
All my googles have turned up corporate advertising BS =/

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Matzon]

sorry no, didn't even know they existed before your post.

[Falken]

You don't have to use getWidth(); they will still accept your code if you use a member variable containing the screen width - as long as it isn't declared 'final'.

It is my understanding that they have a tool which will change the properties in your .class files.  So if you had a global variable called 'screenwidth' and it was set to 128, their tool could change the bytecode to assign it a different width.  Clearly it only works if the tool can identify code relating to the screen width.  If you were to use hardcoded values then they would be meaningless to the tool, as it would just be a number, there is no label associated with it.  

At least that's how I think it works, but I could be wrong.
Not sure how good they are.

[Matzon]

fwiw, I am still very sceptic - particularly since I can't find any worthwhile info on their site. How does it integrate with existing build environemnts - what about per customer injected code, what about resource management per device etc. etc.

My experience so far, tells me that no product can just magically transform your Nokia Series 90 code to work on a Sony Ericsson T610. You still have to do a lot of work to make that happen.

[Falken]

They have a J2ME developers website with forums and articles on 'developing portable code'.  It's free to register. http://www.tiradeveloper.com/

I agree with your scepticism.  We are currently considering whether to outsource some of our more difficult ports to a 'Tira Certified Partner'.  I can't imagine they'll do a perfect conversion without dropping a few features.   But we'll do the easy ones and they can do the difficult ones that is assuming they can do it.

[Fraggle]

Exactly the same scepticisme here.
My guess is that they have a robust set of tools they bundled as a product.
There are 2 or 3 other companies doing the same (can't remember the names but you could find them by digging http://www.midlet-review.com news).

There is antenna and j2me polish already that can help.. but it's difficult to switch from our tools and methods to thoses tools and methods.
Also, doja is very much forgotten while it's one of the most standarised MIDP-like specs out there (and starting to be quite popular among operators).

Hope this helps,

Fraggle