1. Prototyping to explore technology Action-research using J2ME and ACE Sigurd Tjøstheim and Morten Tokle

2. What we have done Define selection criteria. Select technologies to explore and product to develop. Use prototyping to explore technologies. Compare with related work at Schlumberger Information Solutions Summarize findings

3. J2ME

4. Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE)

5. Product Reversi (Othello) for mobile phone Client in J2ME /MIDP Server in C++ /ACE Log onto server, challenge other user, play game.

6. Related work at Schlumberger 5 prototyping projects to assess different aspects of a framework and the underlying technology: C# and.NET Missing functionality identified Requirements for future development detected Problems with development environment detected: Visual Studio doesn’t scale up.

7. Our own findings,examples J2ME has limited support for graphics. JBuilder environment for J2ME was a headache. It did not support interfaces. ACE has a number of problems in relation to learnability wide use of nested macros complicates the design user will have to know a number of patterns in order to understand ACE It takes about four weeks to become efficient on the ACE platform.

8. Conclusion Our action research shows that prototyping is a very valuable tool in order to explore technology thoroughly. Prototyping can identify problems related to a technology, which isn’t easy to discover from the documentation of the respective technology. This includes missing functionality with respect to the application domain, problems with development environment, and problems with technology learnability.