ColdFusion MX Professional Projects

This book is organized into twelve chapters and one appendix. There are basically three sections. The first two chapters are introductory material. Chapters 3 through 9 provide complete coverage of the MIDP APIs. Chapters 10 through 12 cover advanced topics. The complete breakdown of chapters is listed here:

• Chapter 1, "Introduction," provides context and motivation for the rest of the book. J2ME is explained in detail, gradually zooming in to MIDP.

• Chapter 2, "Building MIDlets," is intended to be a teaser. It includes an example application that allows you to look up the definitions of words over the Internet using any MIDP device. Along the way you'll learn a lot about developing applications for the MIDP platform.

• Chapter 3, "All About MIDlets," goes into detail about the life cycle and packaging of MIDP applications.

• Chapter 4, "Almost the Same Old Stuff," describes the pieces of the MIDP API that will be familiar to Java programmers.

• Chapter 5, "Creating a User Interface," is the first of three chapters devoted to MIDP's user-interface packages. It provides an overview of MIDP's user-interface package and goes into detail about the simple visual components.

• Chapter 6, "Lists and Forms," picks up where Chapter 5 left off, describing MIDP's advanced user-interface components.

• Chapter 7, "Persistent Storage," describes MIDP's mechanism for storing data.

• Chapter 8, "Connecting to the World," contains all the juicy details about how MIDP applications can send and receive data over the Internet.

• Chapter 9, "Programming a Game Interface," is the third chapter about user interface. It describes the low level, or "game," API that can be used for specialized application user interfaces.

• Chapter 10, "Performance," describes techniques for coping with the limited resources that are available on small devices.

• Chapter 11, "Parsing XML," examines the spectrum of small XML parsers that are currently available. It describes how to port parsers to MIDP and briefly discusses the usage involves with each parser.

• Chapter 12, "Protecting Network Data," discusses how to protect valuable data on the insecure Internet. It includes two sample applications that demonstrate cryptographic techniques for protecting data.

• Finally, an Appendix contains a complete API reference for the classes and interfaces that make up MIDP. The method signatures for the public API of each class and interface are listed for handy quick reference.