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Motorola Seeks Mobile Unity at JavaOne
Mike Barton writes "InfoWorld's Paul Krill reports that Motorola and Eclipse will unveil open source mobile initiatives at the JavaOne conference this week to broaden Java's mobile and software ecosystem. From the article: 'Motorola also will develop under an open process a references implementation and compliance test for Motorola-driven Java Specification Requests, such as the Mobile Information Device Profiles (MIDP) 3.0 specification.' Motorola's goal is "write-once, run everywhere" implementation capabilities."
Write once, debug everywhere.
Zing!
If there's an area that really needs compile-once, run-anywhere it's cell phones. Last time I looked at MIDP it was really hobbled by catering to the lowest common denominator - IIRC, all you had for user interaction was up, down, select and keypad entry. Hopefully there's some progress on that front.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Until then, I'll still be stuck with intentionally Java-broken phones. Unity my butt.
Every major cell phone provider seems the defend their RF real estate with hobbled phones and pay-to-breathe business model.
Oh, well, at least there'll be something cool to look forward to when they finally move this alpha to an island somewhere.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
A Jad preverifier would be a nice start.
write-once, run everywhere. Hasn't this been the unofficial motto of Java for years now? And how true is it now compared to 1997? Utopian credo apparently.
Wow. Just look at all the ads on the page. There is even a pop-up. I thought those things were extinct for the larger websites. If you go to the top right of the page it folds down to give you a better look at, that's right, more ads.
With a name like Infoworld...
That's even much much more true for J2ME than for standard Java. The used JVMs have more bugs than any normal piece of software. I agree, it is much harder to write embedded JVM, you have many different operating systems and hardware, but still some bugs should be found and fixed easy with automated test suite.
I recently found a bug on my Nokia 6600. If you set your time zone to a negative one against Greenwich (for example GMT-2), your application will not start if it is using Calendar functions. Set the time zone back (GMT+1) and it works OK. And worse, it seems the bug can be dated many years back on different Nokia phones and I'm almost sure it is not fixed on the current ones.
And my lovely one is on Nokia 7650. It sends the HTTP header like
GET / HTTP1,1
instead of GET / HTTP1.1
if your phone language is one that uses comma for number separation (like German). Switch to English and it works (OK, they were still other bugs to care about). Of course almost every server responds with Bad Request on such one. Tell the user, he need to use English menu, or to go to the service center for firmware upgrade to use your application...
I can speak only of myself, but since I started writing java code, I started running everywhere...
I had another sig before, but this one is better
No, u r teh phailure.
As much as I hate to bring it up, Microsoft has become the leader in mobility development. Why? Because the Java camp DOES NOT HAVE tools a VB developer can use.
WORA should be changed to ATBDBA (Able to be developed by anyone).
Before the flames kick in, you can not honestly tell me one can develop, test, and deploy with Eclipse any quicker than with Visual Studio 2005!
I WISH it was there, but it is not. I have no joy in paying more Microsoft Taxes, but time is money and I can build a great PPC application in c# in a fraction of time it would take me to do it in Java.
It's the tools, not the platform, that make great software!
Although you can't get it there yet, check http://opensource.motorola.com/ where it appears the discussion on this is suppossed to take place, at least from Motorola's point of view..
D.
I've been to many JavaOne conferences. I've heard the cry to develop for MIDP.
I listened to the vendors and Sun, and all the "There's lots of opportunity".
You know what? That was complete bullshit.
The hurdles a small development company (3 or 4 guys, or smaller) has to go through to get an app developed is one thing. That can be handled. Code is code. Even with bugs in some of their phones (Hi there, Samsung), issues can be worked around.
The real problem is dealing with the phone vendors and the carriers. The vendors less so than the carriers. They charge an enormous amount of money to do "compliance" testing, and then, IF you're lucky, you'll get picked to be put on their download lists. And then they take a massive cut of the purchase price.
Like I said, this is IF you're lucky. The last time we looked into it, small publishers had to get accepted by bigger publishers just to get your app noticed.
This is yet another instance of the unbridled greed that cell phone carriers have in this market; Handhelds, such as Treo (Palm & now, Windows), don't have the crap to deal with that Java apps do.
Stick with Palm/Windows unless you can get picked up by a big publishers (JAMDAT, etc). The headaches with working with Sprint's "support" (ha!) isn't worth it.
I've done some J2ME development and it can be chore. Phone display sizes/interfaces (MIDP stuff) aside, there are a couple of other things that make the development environment less than ideal.
--Most phone still on supoprt CLDC 1.0 while CLDC 1.1 has been available for a couple of years (major benefit of 1.1 is floating point support)
--Mobile carrier support for development
Nextel (now Sprint) was the best IMHO WRT J2ME with their iDen program. Motorola made development documentation easily available (Nokia does too IIRC) and even provided documentation and examples to their java location APIs. I must say it was pretty cool to develop a J2ME geocaching app that could work almost as well as a dedicated GPS unit (with the phone you don't have a much accuracy as a dedicated unit, but I was still able to find the caches). The bonus was that the phone app could then send a query to the geocache site with your current location and then retrieve nearby locations; I used this a few times while on vacation.
Yeah, it was fun, but since J2ME location APIs (if available) are vendor sepcific (no JSR was even in the works at the time when I did this), it wasn't just write once debug everywhere, it was write everywhere, debug everywhere. Sure factory patterns and the like make development easier, but with J2ME you want your code to be as small as possible and sometimes what might be the "best" OO approach may not be practical on a J2ME device.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Tried Netbeans? Y'know, GUI builder, works for J2ME... And does MIDP GUI design too?
Nuff said.
Course it'd be nice if the JVM were a little easier to install on linux...and getting it to work with the browser didn't require a million hacks..
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
And that from a vendor who currently has the worst java implementation (slowest, buggiest, generally sluggish interfaces and long time until events are delivered where apropriate) on the market...
You run everywhere by writting java code. ... wait a minute?
http://saveie6.com/
Right when I think I've gotten that song out of my head, too!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
And where is the A910?
Still no development kit at motocoder.
Just try to get the Nokia J2ME: 1) Join Nokia web site 2) Download the J2ME 3) Ask for a key to finish the installation 4) The installation crashes 5) You need to download again 6) Repeat steps 3 to 6 And this is for Nokia, Motorola has something similar and of course LG Then there is not way to test you code in the millon phones (same Phone series, different results) so J2ME is dead (at least for me)
Motorola's goal is "write-once, run everywhere" implementation capabilities.
It would be nice if Java itself could have that capability...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
J2ME will never be write-once, run-anywhere. And it's not Sun's fault, it's the developers' fault. Just like on Windows, all the devs want their applications to have cool, skinned UI's, and they all create (relatively) proprietary, skinned, custom interfaces. Of course the images have to be a different size and the buttons have to be labelled differently for each phone, so they have to make different versions. Add on to that the stack of API's that are only supported on some phones (JTWI helped, but not much), and you have a system that basically requires building custom JAR files for each phone, if not actually recompiling the program itself.
We should really praise these efforts, since anything that encourages portability is good, but, realistically, developers are too lazy and too obsessed with looks to write an app that just uses a standard GUI and/or adjusts to screen size and device features.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
"Debug everywhere" is true. My phone's JVM crashed once because I overflowed an integer. In Java, a supposedly "safe" language. Phone manufacturers really need to get their acts together. Perhaps if some company came out with a Java-on-a-chip solution that allowed most of the phone to run in Java, then interfacing would be easier and reliability would be higher (because you're only debugging the one Java implementation instead of the native OS plus a JVM tacked on to that).
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Love it or hate it -- ah never mind, just hate it. Eclipse sucks.</spam></troll>
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
Motorola seems to go OUT OF THEIR WAY to make it really hard to write code on their "much lauded" Razr phone. ESPECIALLY when it comes to working with the phone book. One of the executitives of one of my clients wants to change all of the phone numbers on his RAZR and have different "profiles" as he travels internationally, and he wants them synced up to the database in the home office. Motorola has locked out the RAZR's native phone book to developers. Someone please please prove me wrong!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Has he tried +... numbers? I believe (but stand to be corrected) that it's up to the network to handle that.
Since you mention international travel I'm guessing he has a GSM RAZR (Cingular/T-Mobile). My SonyEricsson on Cingular handles international format numbers without problems, tested in the US, Canada and a couple of European countries so far.
From what I've read, Superwaba is better than the other claimed standard alternatives. Anyone has some experience in mobile Java development to confirm or refute that:
http://java.about.com/od/superwabamobilevm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperWaba
http://www.superwaba.com.br/en/swxj2me.asp