Java Platform, Micro Edition

Java Platform, Micro Edition, often called simply Java ME or J2ME, is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices (micro-controllers, sensors, gateways, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, TV set-top boxes, printers). A program created for the platform is called a MIDlet. The platform uses the object-oriented Java programming language, and is part of the Java software-platform family. It was designed by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) in 1999 under the name Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition. The earliest commercial Java ME software and supporting consumer hardware were released in 2001. MIDlets run inside a Java virtual machine understood by devices of various mobile manufacturers. This "write once, run anywhere" approach along with highly compressed file sizes made Java ME very popular for building simple mobile apps, most notably mobile games. As of 2013, there were more than three billion Java ME–enabled mobile phones in the market, but the platform was in continued decline by that time as feature phones had been overtaken by smartphones. Smartphones used dedicated hardware acceleration chips utilising APIs like OpenGL ES rather than relying on device CPU-based software rendering to handle graphics, which had mostly been the case on Java ME.