The Mobile Developer

JavaOne: Java Meets Wireless

Everything always seems to happen at once! Not only am I getting ready for my talks at the Wrox Professional Wireless Developer Conference in Amsterdam, I'm also finishing my second book, Java 2 Micro Edition: Professional Developer's Guide, to be published early this fall by John Wiley & Sons. Not to mention I'm busy at work with continuing work on the iAnywhere Wireless Server, which will be the topic of a future column. Somehow I found the time to visit San Francisco and attend JavaOne. As promised in my last column, here's my report on the conference.

JavaOne is a big conference. There were well over 20,000 attendees this year, the fifth year the conference has been run. It certainly demonstrates the continued strength of the Java platform.

Unlike last year's show, where they announced the Java 2 Micro Edition and gave attendees a very early release of Java for Palm handhelds, there was no particularly exciting announcements at this year's show, at least in my mind. They did get Magic Johnson up on stage to throw some basketballs into the audience, and Steve Jobs made an appearance to announce that Apple was going to properly support Java 2 in its upcoming operating system release, but those were the highlights of the keynote. The action was really in the session rooms and on the exhibit floor.

The exhibit hall was always busy, with big booths from the usual suspects. Sun in particular had lots of booths lining the outside of the hall, each booth demonstrating a different Java technology or service from Sun. One booth that caught my eye was demonstrating a couple of Sun research projects: DENT, an XHTML Basic browser, and KSSL, an implementation of SSL. Both are written in Java and run on the KVM. Neither are offical products as of yet.

It seemed like half the vendors in the hall were selling either an application server or a virtual machine. No surprise about the application servers: Java is fast becoming the server-side programming language of choice, and the Java 2 Enterprise Edition was being supported by all the major application server vendors in one form or another. There were too many appserver vendors in my mind, so expect a shakeout soon enough.

The number of virtual machines that were available -- either home-grown or ports of the KVM -- was what surprised me. It shows a definite interest in the marketplace for Java on small devices. It's nice to see Java return to its roots as a language for programming consumer devices. I especially liked the demos that esmertec was giving of their Jbed runtime environment running on a Palm in direct competition to the KVM.

There was also a lot of interest in wireless technologies, although there were fewer companies there with any kind of wireless product. Servidium's Jaydoh e-business framework product looked good, although I haven't played with it yet. They include specific support for various kinds of browser-based output. The folks from Enhydra were also there. Enhydra is an open source application server that now includes WML support.

One of the biggest wireless players, Research In Motion, made a splash by selling its wireless handhelds at a special price. They were also handing out early access versions of their BlackBerry Java Developer's Kit, which is a J2ME implementation for their wireless handhelds. You can get more info about their Java and download a copy of the JDK from their developer website.

As for the sessions themselves, there was a lot of interest in both the J2EE and the J2ME sessions. For anything involving the KVM I found that you had to get to the room fairly early, otherwise you'd end up sitting on the floor. Definitely a huge interest in getting Java programs to run on these small devices that are popping up everywhere.

For a complete wrap-up of the JavaOne conference, visit the JavaOne website.

Eric Giguère is the author of Palm Database Programming: The Complete Developer's Guide and an upcoming book on the Java 2 Micro Edition. He works as a developer for iAnywhere Solutions, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc. Visit his website at www.ericgiguere.com or send him mail at ericgiguere@ericgiguere.com.