First of all, let’s say that Bada is all but a new OS: Bada is actually a refactored and readapted version of the OS used for years by Samsung as their legacy OS. The good news is that now it has been made available and open to all developers, that can use all the APIs that were previously accessible to Samsung and its partners only.

When I say open it means really open: API set is impressive, and it seems there’s actually nothing that has been left out. The comparison with other “modern” OS (e.g.: iPhone and Android) shows how Bada gives to developers a new level of access to the device and its features.

Bada applications are built by using C/C++ code, but there is a good news for non C-speakers: Bada devices come with Flash Lite support (Samsung Wave ships Flash Lite 3.0) and you can package a Flash Lite application into a native one, and distribute it on the Bada App Store. But the good news are not ended, since the Bada architecture allows Flash Lite content to access every native API! This is huge, and as a Flash developer I cannot be more happy of this!

Coming to the downsides: Bada applications cannot run in background, so no real multitasking is allowed. When an app goes in background, it is simply paused, and you can resume it from the active apps list. As for the development part, the SDK has currently some glitches, as the necessity to be restarted each time an application has to be deployed. Anyway, being not a final release, we can expect improvements in the next versions.

Summarizing it up, the first “contact” with the Bada environment was good: the OS is powerful and open, with the Flash Lite support and native API access being actually the best parts in my opinion. The current only Bada device (the Wave) is fast, responsive and with a nice touchscreen (differently from what seen on some recent Samsung models, see H1).

What remains to see is if all this good stuff will be able to gain a decent market share, and so if it’ll be worth to invest time and money on it.

You can read all the details, download the library together with sample code, and read the full JavaDocs here: MidMaps – J2ME Google Maps library.

So what? Maybe I’m a bit disappointed after the Wave experience, but the first approach with Buzz was not great, at least on mobile (as I still have no Buzz on my Gmail account).

Google is still working hard to release fully-featured clients but, right now, this app (or better, Buzz integrated in the Google Maps app) seems to have no utility at all. Apart from buzzing and seeing random buzzes around me, I cannot simply do anything else.

Moreover, strange thing for Google products, the Buzz API is still in an early, almost useless phase.

It’s just too early? Let’s hope

Today we’ll see how to use Google Maps data within a mobile application.
Google Maps offers REST services that allows accessing its data with simple HTTP requests, so we can easily integrate them within our mobile apps.

Signup for a Google Maps API key

First thing you must do is to signup on this page:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
Once done, you’ll get a key (a simple String) you’ll use for all your query to Google Maps services

Static maps

Standard Google Maps code is suited for web applications, since it includes alot of Ajax functionalities, that are not really useful if you’re building a mobile application. So, the solution is to use static maps service, that will allow us to retrieve single images, easily usable within our apps.

Static maps service supports different image formats (png32, gif, jpg) and customizable image size, so that we can get perfect images for all our needs. As an example, suppose we want to retrieve the location at:

• latitude: 41.867878
• longitude: 12.471516

We can simply retrieve this URL with an HTTP GET request:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=41.867878,12.471516&
format=png32&zoom=8&size=240x320&key=<API_KEY>

This way, we’ll get a PNG32 image, with a width of 240 pixels, and a height of 320, centered at point (41.867878,12.471516), and with a zoom level of 8 (zoom can go from 0 to a maximum level of 19).

Geocode an address

From Google Maps docs:
Geocoding is the process of converting addresses (like “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA”) into geographic coordinates (like latitude 37.423021 and longitude -122.083739)

So, let’s assume we want to build an application that displays the address typed by our user. We should firstly geocode its address to geographics coordinates.
To do this, Google Maps offer another REST service easily accessible with simple HTTP requests.

Let’s say you want to geocode this address “Leicester Square, London”, then you’ll request this URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=Leicester%20Square,%20London
&output=csv&key=<API_KEY>

and you’ll get this output:

200,6,51.510605,-0.130728

Where:

• the first number is a code, that in this case (200) means that geocoding has been successfull (for a full list of status codes you can see here: [1])
• the second number gives a measure of geocoding accuracy (from 0 to 9 – maximum accuracy)
• 3rd and 4th numbers represent latitude and longitude of the geocoded address, so these are the coordinate we’ll use to retrieve the map through the static map service we’ve seen before

As you can see, there is an ‘output’ parameter within the geocode request, and this means that we can choose the output format we prefer for our needs. Supported formats are:

• xml
• kml (same as xml, but with different Content-Type)
• json (not really useful for mobile apps)
• csv (comma separated values)

Proxy server, usage limits

Since your Google Maps API key is bound to a specific URL, to access map services you should setup a proxy server that will receive HTTP requests from your mobile application and forward them to Google Maps REST URLs, giving back Google responses to mobile clients.

Also, be aware that there is a limit to the number of requests (both for static maps and geocode service) you can do each day. For personal uses they’re more than enough, anyway consider this point if you plan to develop commercial services.

Google Maps J2ME API and sample application

Now, you want code right? Here it is:

• a J2ME class to access Google Maps REST services: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/J2ME_Google_Maps_API
• a sample application using Google Maps data: http://www.jappit.com/index.php?page=emulator&midlet=google_maps