The hunt for the J2ME-friendly IoC is on!

I'm in the beginning phases of a Blackberry/J2ME project -- and along with other limitations that come with this wonderful platform, the lack of support for reflection and 1.3 language level mean that the vast majority of existing IoC containers are unusable. (Google has Guice for Android with no AOP, but even that requires support for annotations).

So the space of IoC containers on J2ME is pretty limited. The one framework that has caught my attention is called Signal Framework, and it looks pretty promising. It tries to stay conceptually close to Spring Framework's IoC, implementing a small subset of its functionality, and does so without relying on bytecode-modification or causing runtime xml parsing. Instead, it processes configuration XMLs at build-time to generate java code which implements this IoC functionality.

Generally speaking, code generation at build time seems like a very wise approach for mobile applications -- and if my app has to do less XML parsing on user's device, that's great too!

So, what have your experiences been with implementing IoC on J2ME/CLDC, and how were you able to extinguish that bitter taste in your mouth?

My Stack Overflow repost of this is here.

Google Books: now the internet we want can finally begin

The recent news of Google's settlement with authors and publishers are just great. This has the potential to really transform the Internet as we know it and make it a worldwide (or, for now, US-wide) network for scholarship. That's the kind of world-wide web that every science fiction writer of the 20th century has been envisioning, and, if Google is able to get through the final details of this settlement, we'll finally see the dawn of an internet where knowledge is accessible as easily as porn. And it only took us 40 years.