11 Develop and Test Your Embedded Application

This chapter describes techniques for developing, testing, and compiling your embedded application. It applies to both headless and headful applications.

This chapter contains the following topics:

Develop Your Application
Test Your Application on the Host Computer
Testing Your Application on the Target Device

For information that is unique to headful applications, see Develop Headful Applications.

Tip:

For an overview of the development process, see Quick Start for Application Developers.

Develop Your Application

Develop applications on a host computer with a full JDK. You can use the Java application development tools of your choice. See, for example, Developing Embedded Applications in NetBeans IDE.

As you refer to the standard JDK documentation, use the information in the API documentation about compact profiles to ensure that you are working within the constraints of the JRE that will be installed on the embedded device. See Determining Compact Profiles for API Objects.

Test Your Application on the Host Computer

Test your application frequently to ensure that your application will run under the compact profile that is included in your custom JRE. There are two standard JDK tools that check the profile: javac and jdeps.

Compile with the javac Tool and the -profile Option

When you compile your application with the javac tool, specify the profile installed on the target device with the -profile option to test whether all the APIs in your application are included in the profile that be included in your custom JRE.

For example, the following command compiles the application and at the same time tests to make sure that all of your APIs are included in the compact1 profile.

$ javac -profile compact1 Hello.java

If Hello.java uses an API that is not present in the compact1 profile, the compiler detects the error.

Use the jdeps Tool to Test Minimum Required Compact Profile

After compiling, you can use the jdeps dependency analyzer tool with the -P option to determine the minimum compact profile required for each class in your application. For example:

% jdeps -P HelloWorld.class

Here is an example of the output:

HelloWorld.class -> /net/test11.us.example.com/export/java-re/jdk/8/ea/b124/binaries/linux-i586/jre/lib/rt.jar
   <unnamed> (HelloWorld.class)
      -> java.io                                            compact1
      -> java.lang                                          compact1

In this example, both classes used in the application minimally require the compact1 profile.

For more information about this tool, see the jdeps documentation for UNIX or Windows.

Testing Your Application on the Target Device

Occasionally you should test your application on the target device, and when the application is final, deploy it. See Deploy Embedded Applications.