FlashLite or J2ME, the Hamlet's dilemma

During last FlashLite Live events held by Jonathan, many of partecipants were J2ME developers who asked why use Macromedia FlashLite if you know J2ME programming.
The first thing you can think to support the use of J2ME is that it's supported by the largest number of handset. But don't forget that the development cycle is longer than using Macromedia FlashLite.
Consider this tutorial from Sun Developer page that explains you how to create some simple vectorial graphics using M2G :

Getting Started with Mobile 2D Graphics for J2ME
http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/articles/s2dvg/index.html

Now imagine to do the same simple thing using Actionscript :)
Then J2ME applications have big problem with compatibility through different mobile phone models, so you have to spend more time to test and debug them. 
John Dowdell @ Macromedia said some months ago about J2ME-to-FlashLIte comparison, that the big difference is the level at which they work. J2ME is lower-level than the Flash Lite libraries, so it's easier to move it to newer devices, but all evidence seen so far confirms that development costs will be higher with Java than with Flash. If the J2ME component in a phone needs to rely on additional local external components (an SVG-Tiny renderer, an audio codec, etc) then the development problems become more complex (cf DHTML, VRML). I could go on to some of the other points, but it risks going further off-topic to the core here.
I totally agree with him.

We also discussed about this topic on FlashLite Yahoo group so I decided to report some interested opinions :

Tim Walling on FlashLite development cycle  : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashLite/message/101

Mike Krisher and his top 5 Flash Lite advantages :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashLite/message/103

Naz (Object404.com) on Macromedia FlashLite development cycle :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FlashLite/message/99

Read also what Cesar Tardaguila @ Design Nation answered when his boss asked him regarding downloadable games, which platform do you think will be dominant, FlashLite or J2ME(see the comments).
Brian Rieger and  SlaveOfTheMind.com and their thoughts about using FlashLite or J2ME.

Read the translation of FlashLite and J2ME entire position analysis comparison blog post

Comments

[Czytniki kodów kreskowych]

Really interesting Post, I seem to have to constantly battle with J2ME, its a contant battle, but it seems in recent times it has started to get easier, I'm not sure if its because I am learning more or the program is getting more user friendly. But things are starting to click for me which is great news

[uggs shoe]

For the article the author used an excerpt from my book in the section "Connect to Amazon S3 in a Flash" to explain the fact that SWF file cannot read data from a "remote" host without explicit consent.

[Supra Shoes]

Web application developers can now reuse existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.