As I discussed in Chapter 1, one of the reasons you might be interested in MIDP as a platform is that it's based on the Java programming language and the Java APIs. You'll also recall that MIDP is built on top of the Connected, Limited Device Configuration (CLDC). The CLDC contains most of the APIs that will look familiar to experienced Java programmers. As of this writing, CLDC 1.0 is the current version, but the finishing touches are just being applied to the CLDC 1.1 specification. I'll mention the changes between CLDC 1.0 and CLDC 1.1 throughout this chapter.

In this chapter, we'll explore the java.lang, java.io, and java.util packages as defined in the CLDC. I'll assume you're already familiar with the basic APIs of J2SE; I'll walk through what's the same and what's different.

At the time of this writing (first quarter 2003), CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 have not yet been implemented on real devices. Although MIDP 2.0 will eventually be implemented on top of CLDC 1.1, the first wave of MIDP 2.0 implementations will use CLDC 1.0.