Making a cameo appearance during the opening keynote, Motorola Inc chief executive Ed Zander boasted that the mobile handset industry will churn out over one billion units this year, far outstripping PCs. And while he didn’t give breakdowns as to how many of those will be Java-enabled, earlier this year OSGi, a standards organization for multimedia gateways, said there are 800 million Java phones currently in circulation worldwide.
Motorola and Nokia took alternating shots proving which one was the most community-minded in promoting standards. During his moment onstage, Zander pleaded for the mobile device community to converge on common implementations.
Zander then announced the company would open source its test framework and reference tests cases for the Mobile Information Device Profiles (MIDP) 3.0 specification (also known as JSR 271), which is still under development; and JSR 82, which accommodates Bluetooth.
The challenge is that the technology stack for compact handheld platforms includes multiple layers for which the technology and standards base is still evolving.
The Java ME stack includes two major tiers. Beside MIDP, which specifies the runtime, there is also the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC), which defines configuration for devices with limited footprints like mobile phones, and the Connected Device Configuration (CDC), which covers fatter mobile clients.
According to Tom Ojala, director of marketing for Forum Nokia, the unit of Nokia that deals with developers, there are at least 30 different APIs in the Java mobile technology stack. And that doesn’t count BREW, a proprietary stack from Qualcomm which the company claims can run Java.
Everyone does JSR 135, which is the multimedia API, said Nokia’s Ojara, who added, Beyond that, roughly 15 to 20% of the stack are non-standard implementations.
That last 15 to 20% is what Zander was referring to in his brief talk. According to Nokia’s Ojara, JSR 248 should resolve much of that problem. Ojara was referring to a specification current under final review that specifies the building blocks for an end-to-end mobile Java environment from which devices manufacturers could mix and match.
Ojara pointed to another spec in final review, JSR 232, which applies the OSGi gateway to Java handsets. With such a gateway standardized, Ojara said that the software for embedded Java apps could be more readily updated.
In effect, Nokia and Motorola are engaging in an argument of who can say yes to standards the loudest. For instance, both are on the JSR 248 group. And while Motorola is crowing about open sourcing its new MIDP 3.0 test suite, Nokia says it’s been busy open sourcing in related areas like mobile Linux tablets, which are higher end devices, and VoIP extensions.
In the background, Sun announced beta release toolkits for upcoming versions of the Java Micro Edition (Java ME) that largely revolves around providing support for JSR 248.
