Sorry your browser is not supported!

A comparison from someone who has used all and has experience with their own published games. Meant for a small team or single person who wants a fast turn-around and big market with very little management.


J2ME
-Runs on everything but IOS, and older non-color handsets. This includes Android, pretty much all >1998 handsets even prepaid..
-Some handsets don't have TCP/IP, GPS, BT profiles
-All have canvas class and all midlets of midlet class
-simple classes and methods even on game-canvas level
-On canvas and game-canvas levels requires manual control handling and creation(like flash)
-Touch screen or more-compatible midlet-command UI options
*Bigger market with little-more production-time, still have to make IOS port

HTML5
-It's HTML 5 <canvas> and javascript..
-Android and Apple games in HTML5 are just in a web element based app
-Only supported under recent browser engines
-Runs on anything with a HTML5 browser except where tools block publishing for them.. Typical for BSD and Linux
*Excludes a lot of markets/platforms but very fast development, text editor and browser is best workflow. You simply make a web element app to present it.

AGK
-xcode, android, mobile lib based code generator built into eclipse IDE
-shares ~3 developers with FreedomEngine and a lot of other products
-Limits to newer platform versions without using any new features. Many recent devices still don't update to supported versions yet have all the APIs
*Excludes a lot of platforms/markets and platform-versions, but relatively fast production-times

FreedomEngine
-CGI interfaced xcode, android, HTML5, directx framework
-shares ~3 developers with AppGameKit and a lot of other products
*Excludes a lot of platforms/markets and platform-versions, but relatively fast production-times, more streamlined than AGK

PhoneGap
-CGI HTML 5 generator and app-wrapper
*Excludes a lot of platforms/markets and platform-versions, but relatively fast production-times. Documentation makes it look more complex, maybe to hide that it's a HTML/Jscript generator with epic marketing..

Depends what kind of apps you want to do.

if you want to do productivity apps on ios + android + windowsphone, then html5 + phonegap are a very good option.

logistically speaking, HTML5 and J2ME, where there is a transparent BASIC compiler using <canvas> and game-canvas, makes the most sense..

This covers literally every platform, including all currently excluded, with less than half the work and better power-management and acceleration implementations..

Nice breakdown... I would be interested in seeing which of those support or have debugging capabilities?

The only one I know of myself is AppGameKit T2?

AGK has a syntax debugger, and the xcode, android sdk,, and compiler debuggers on T2.

J2ME and Jscript(HTML5 canvas) have syntax, real-time syntax, and runtime debuggers, decent ones out of the box with most browsers for HTML5. J2ME has remote debugging with JDK emulators I believe.