Las week, on the J2ME meeting of our Princetun JUG, Jonathan Knudsen said that because of memory constraints of the mobile devices J2ME uses a small version of JDK/JRE were not all Java classes are present, for example, it includes only a minimum number of collections (just the Vector and a couple of more) and a simpified version of GUI, sort of an old AWT or something.

This made me thinking, is this a must for Java to weigh about 20Mb (especially for the Web applications)? Lots of people will never have broadband internet connections, and those who do have it, still experience slowness at various times of the day. Popular virtual machine Flash from Adobe is less than 1.2MB in size (actually Flash 9 has two VMs under the hood for compatibility reasons and Flash 8 was half the size).

There are tons of non-mobile applications that do not need fancy graphics or LinkedLists? For example, lots of Wall Street applications have plain looking screens. Maybe it’s time to create a Java CE edition (C stands for Crippled) so many business users can enjoy fast downloads too?

JavaLobby runs a discussion on removing packages from JDK and making them downloadable. +1 from me on this one.