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."

Comments

Good luck

[bunions]

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.

Pocket PC

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Motorola/Nextel was good for J2ME

[FerretFrottage]

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.