MIDlet

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What Does MIDlet Mean?

A MIDlet is an application that uses the mobile information device profile (MIDP) for the Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) environment. When Java was the most widely used mobile platform, the MIDlet became the most ubiquitous of mobile applications. In fact, MIDlets still exist in a majority of low-end feature phones.

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Techopedia Explains MIDlet

A MIDlet is built for resource limited devices, such as pagers, personal digital assistants (PDA) and phones. As cell phones outpaced other devices, and games made up the majority of these applications, MIDlets became associated with Java games on cell phones.

Java’s main challenge was to facilitate the use of applications on devices with constrained resources. Cell phones that support MIDlets have small displays, slow central processing units (CPU), small memory, ordinary keypads and minimal connectivity features.

A MIDlet is normally deployed as a suite composed of a Java Archive (.jar) file and a Java Application Descriptor (.jad) file. For security reasons, a MIDlet cannot modify itself or the runtime environment and cannot escape the runtime environment.

There are various MIDlet installation methods, as follows:

  • Direct method: Entails the use of a connection between the development computer and device. Although the most commonly used connection medium is data cable, employing wireless connections, like Bluetooth and infrared (IR), is also possible.
  • Over-the-air (OTA) provisioning: The MIDlet is uploaded to a Web server and accessed via the target device’s built-in browser. Because anyone can access the MIDlet at any time, this method is ideal for large scale deployments.
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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.