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The popularity of J2ME and game development has sprouted several carrier and manufacturer specific custom classes that support game development. Of course, the main problem with this is portability, for example using Siemens Sprite class would make it difficult for you to port your game to a Nokia handset, the most portable solution is create your own sprite class.

But with the release of MIDP 2.0 some of those problems in game portability was taken away with the introduction of five new classes:

• GameCanvas
• Sprite
• Layer
• LayerManager
• TiledLayer

Though you probably won’t use the Layer class directly, it is actually an abstract class used by Sprite, LayerManager and TiledLayer. These classes can be found in the following package java.microedition.lcdui.game. Not only is portability less of problem but also with these new game classes your code may potentially become a lot smaller now that you do not have to implement custom classes such as Sprite. These classes are now apart of the underlying Java environment on the mobile handset.

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