Thursday, June 19, 2008

Terrence Barr: The future of java on mobile plattforms

This is a blog from the Open Nordic conference in Skien Norway 19-20 june 2008.


Terrence Barr: The future of java on mobile plattforms


Listening to Terrence Barr talking about the future of java on mobule phones. I got in a little late, but this is a few notes from what I did get what I got:

PhoneME is an open source implementation of java for small machine.
Can run midlets, can run on Sun SPOT & Squawk VM and PSP. Can be used to make your own consumer device :-). It has a number of persistence frameworks. A bunch of IU toolkits.

GUI stuff

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a part of MSA (Mobile Service Architecture), and should be available on most newer phones.

LWUIT -> Lightweight UI Toolkit. Quite interesting.
  • Swing inspired
  • Matisse will be integrated with LWUIT (a specific widget set).
  • Doesn´t have a HTML renderer, but that would be nice ;)
Beyond mobile.
One example is the blueRay runtime (which is quite capable), that makes it possible to mesh static content (DVDs or whatever) with dynamically updated content. Imagine a DVD that contains an up-to-date list of stuff relevant to the content on the DVD, it´s possible today or so the man says ;)

Sun has a kind of vision about it being possible to create content that is cross-plattform for just about all kinds of screens: Workstations, phones TV etc.

JavaFX:
  • Rich content should be simpler. Flash does a lot of intersting things.
  • At its core it is the JavaFX scripting language.
  • Targeted towards designer/consumer segment.
  • Hope for cool tools to be developed, but they don´t exist yet.
  • Java 6 has scripting extensions, and FX is just one more of these.
  • Is a runtime that is layered on top of java.
  • The idea is to run one JavaFX application, and then let tools deploy it to various platforms, very close to a final version.
  • Question: How easy will it be to run JavaFX on an Android platform :-)
  • The FX runtime and SDK will be out this summer (beta). Player available. Coming to more mobile devices spring 09. Will be an application to be installed on top of the phone.
  • openjfx.dev.java.net, open source version of some FX stuff.

Questions and answers:

  • Java on the iPhone: Some legal wrangeling going on, nothing determined yet. Need to distribute things from the apple store. Have it running internally at Sun, but it cant´be released. The prototype is running, they hava both jamvm (java se) running, a clean room implementation. Can be run on a jailbroken iphone. The core VM was ported in two days. phoneme alred support
  • What about a newer java than 1.4 on phones: Sun is thinking about updating the CDC/CLDC (Connected device configuration / Connected Limited Device Configuration). Terrence is not reallyb certain that you need a more fancy language, claims it requires more resources (I´m not so sure about that). CDC now has a fairly modern Java except for the java 5 language features: CDC now has reflection but still don´t have generics and autoboxing.