JavaOne 2007; Recap JavaME

It’s time to go home after a week of conferencing. I am sitting at the airport waiting for my flight back home. It has been an intense week with a lot of new interesting stuff. I thought I ought to sum up this year’s JavaOne conference.

This was the seventh time I’ve gone to JavaOne, so I thought of comparing this year’s with previous ones, but I will be in a separated blog post later.

Some of the hot mobility topics at this JavaOne:

• Netbeans 6.0 preview (M9) and all new features for mobility, it look really good.
• The SavaJe has resurrected as JavaFX Mobile (Read more about JavaFX Mobile here) and it also look like SUN will Open Source the SavaJe SW
• Many sessions were about the SVG API, with SVG you are able to create high-quality UI. Tools like Netbeans and Hyperion Mobile Designer integrate very well together for creating SVG applications
• Blu-ray and the use of JavaME/CDC/Foundation Profile is pretty cool
• Sun-Spot, I’ve gotta get me one of those kits! The kit includes two SPOTs and an SDK – unfortunately not ready for Europe yet
• Netbeans support for development of Sun Spot applications, really nice
• Thanks to the Open Sourcing JavaME there are now ports on other platforms, e.g. that Nokia N800. The phoneME project has made success in very short time, great work done!!
• Developers will soon be able to develop applications that comply with the Mobile Operational Management JSR 232 standard (OSGi) and use SNAP Mobile in less-than-optimum networks, according to two announcements made by Nokia at JavaOne 2007.
• Nokia and IBM gave a demo at JavaOne for developers looking to extend the value of devices to remote desktops and mobile clients across networks that may not be always connected. They showed a service called IBM Lotus Expeditor. It is an end-to-end solution based on Nokia devices enabled by eRCP (embedded rich client platform) and OSGi.
• Web services to Go, JSR-279 and JSR-280 soon finish (~ June 2007 final approved and devices supporting it 6 month later). With these two RSR’s it will be easier for developer to working with Web Services in the mobility area and it will also add better support for parsing XML data.
• Ericsson's Mobile JSF kit, which implements a reference solution about mobile-device-specific rendering for mobile applications based on Java EE
• WidSets, look very cool and soon a new big release.
• Project Orbit, the Sun Java ME viewer of Laszlo content. It is a Java ME CDC/Personal Basis application that uses the Rhino engine to run LZX programming language Web 2.0 (AJAX style) applications. Very cool!
• Data binding and JavaME, Netbeans support data binding.
• Sprint releasing a beta version of Sprint next set of developer tools, the Sprint WTK 3.2 and Mobility IDE. It is a modify Netbeans with added functions e.g. file browser
• MIDP 3.0 will perhaps come; how long it will take I don’t understand??
  Read more at open.source.motorola
• Perst Lite – a Open Source database for javaME
• Advanced Mobile Service Architecture based on JSR-232. This is really hot!

What I would like to hear more about at this JavaOne, but it was missing at this JavaOne:

• The progress of JSR-249, Mobile Service Architecture Advanced
• The progress of the Eclipse project embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP)

Conclusions:

• JavaME/CDC1.1/FP1.1 is next generation Java that could compete very well with .Net but companies like Sony Ericsson, Sun and Motorola talk more about JavaME/CLDC1.1/MIDP2.0. This must change very fast I believe!!
• Web Services for JavaME will perhaps be useful at the end of this year
• Advanced Mobile Service Architecture based on JSR-232 is really hot and soon there will be devices supporting it
• JavaME/CDC1.1/FP1.1 for linux is really hot
• I hope companies like Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson soon will release JavaME/CDC1.1/FP1.1 devices, it will put some healthy pressure on the JavaME community. The funny thing now is that MS windows devices support JavaME/CDC.1.1/FP1.1 better because of the Eclispe project eRCP and the phoneME project.
• I am very excited about that Sun has bought SavaJe and let all hope that Sun will be able to release newer versions before too long so. I hope will be able to upgrade my SavaJe Jasper S20 I bought at JavaOne 2006. Meanwhile there is now a site with SaveJe Jasper Developer S20 files
• I have also met some old Java friends from the Java community and also made some new friends. This is one of the major advantages going to JavaOne!

After Javaone a good resource is the JavaOne Online Technical Sessions and Labs, there you will find:

• The static PDF versions of the technical session slides are open for viewing and download to all users
• The multimedia version, which includes the speaker's audio track and text transcription synchronized with the slide deck, is available to anyone who is a Sun Developer Network member.

The above comments where compiled from the notes of myself, Ove, and Robert Varttinen. The same text, more or less, will appear soon on his blog.