Is it necessay to teach os subject in mobile programming course?

[komomo]

Hi,
In a mobile programming training center, the major subjects are j2me and wince.net.
But before those subjects, they also teach os subject about the topic of process scheduling, memory management, virtual memory and so on.
What is the benefit of teaching that subject?
Is it necessary to teach that subject for j2me and wince.net?

[rahulvala]

Hi,
In a mobile programming training center, the major subjects are j2me and wince.net.
But before those subjects, they also teach os subject about the topic of process scheduling, memory management, virtual memory and so on.
What is the benefit of teaching that subject?
Is it necessary to teach that subject for j2me and wince.net?

Yes , It is necessary.
I am lecturer in engineering college.
When we learn the computer ,we should know what is windows Xp,
Like wise when we want to learn mobile and mobile application development framework, we should know what is SYMBIAN, QT, JAVA, MEAMO,,

So to learn mobile OS is very necessary.
Best regards,

[raj_J2ME]

In addition to that like the OS are multiporcessing in the same way the mobiles are also multiprocessing and hence you must be ware of all these things which are basics of the J2ME or even for any other OOP.Similarly process scheduling, memory management, virtual memory are also the critical part of the technology and hence you must be ware of the same before you actually start the programming.

[Tiger79]

Well it's always good to have an understanding on what you are building on...
You are building WITH J2ME(a language) but you are building ONTO a underlying OS..
If for example you wouldn't learn anything about memory management and/or multithreading you might start to think that your apps couold use all avaliable memory, without having an idead that memory is actually subdivided into available memory, or is prone to memory fragmentation and why... Or you might actually start to think that when you are using threads your processor is doing parallel tasks exactly at the same time, which obviously with one core is impossible.. It seems so to an user, and it's being used so by the developers because of it's ease, but a cpu can only do one specific calculation at a time, and multi-threading is only an illusion set up by making use of cpu time slots divided over several processes/tasks/threads...
My personal exp[erience is that someone having a more in-depth knowledge on how a system works will understand and find solutions to problems way quicker and better than someone (for example) who has thought himself J2ME without having knowledge of the underlying OS...
Also, just as an extra point, inbetween those two courses (OS and J2ME) there should also be one for some OOP-basics and maybe even some sort of simple UML if bigger projects are expected...

[petrib]

Of course, one could also say that with Java, one is building on/for a virtual machine and not a real device and its native operating system. So, theoretically, with Java, you need to understand the virtual machine implementation over the physical device and its native operating system. In practice, it is definitely good to understand how the Java VM sits on top of the native OS and how they both relate to the hardware.