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Here Comes The Heartbreak

Posted by editor on November 8, 2007 at 9:37 AM EST

Is Android too good to be true?

Maybe the one-week wait for an SDK is going to turn out to be too long? Having not announced much of substance this week, the Google-led Open Handset Alliance and its "Android" are attracting a fair amount of skepticism. Or outright contempt, in some quarters. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer says it's a press release, not a product: "Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile]."

To a point that's true; what I like to call "Adamson's First Law" says that "all software is vapor until it ships." OK, I cringe a little at agreeing with Steve Ballmer, but hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Daring Fireball points to Steven Frank's blog, Try Again, which is even harsher than putative competitor Ballmer:

What a travesty this Android announcement is. A 34-company committee that's going to oversee the development of a currently non-existent suite of open-source mobile applications to run on as-yet-unspecified hardware. I've never seen so much hot air, and honestly I'm kind of shocked that it came out of Google. A 34-company committee couldn't create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.

And the increasingly foul-mouthed Fake Steve Jobs has left me one or two paragraphs on the subject that I can cite without tripping most obscenity filters:

As for the consortium partners, of course right now they're all pretending to go along, because what the hell, they get their names into the press release as being associated with Google and who cares if anything ever comes of it? It's called releaseware. Do you really think all those other companies are really going to come out with any products? You really think they're just dying to help Google come into their market and scoop up all the money for itself?

Then again, Fake Steve asserts that Google's only building a consortium because it's goring someone else's ox, and wouldn't team up with outsiders on search, a silly assertion that Robert Cooper smacks down on his blog: "You know, John, there is an OpenSearch, which started with Amazon A9, and Google already supports it on all their search services. It is, in fact, a fundamental part of OpenSocial and GData in general. Thanks for playing."

Our own java.net bloggers have been looking at all these tea leaves and trying to make sense of it all -- where does Java ME fit in, how does this relate to JavaFX, and haven't we heard this pitch before? We feature three of these analyses in today's Weblogs. We start with Terrence Barr asking Sooo, what about Google Android and phoneME? After digesting the first barrage of information and talking to a couple of folks in the industry I thought I'd offer up my own personal thoughts about Android and the OHA. First, at a high level, I think the Android announcement shows that the era of proprietary and closed mobile platforms and networks is finally drawing to an end.

David Herron does his part to cut through the noise in gphone is doomed? The Open Incompatible Handset Alliance? "There sure has been a lot of words flying around this week regarding the Android (gphone) phone. I've been tracking some items about the gphone and it's pretty wild all the different points of view. It reminds me of that story about the blind men trying to describe an elephant, none of them can see the whole thing so they describe the part that they can touch."

Sean Sheedy takes a look at the plausibility of Android's "do not fragment" clause... "According to a PC World article, Open Handset Alliance members have agreed "not to fragment nor do things that would result in different versions of the platform." Why is this unachievable, yet at the same time, essential for eliminating fragmentation in both Android and Java ME?"

In Java Today, jMaki introduced an additional set of widgets and sample applications for doing pie charts, line charts, area charts and bar charts. These widgets can be easily installed in NetBeans IDE as an add-on component library. jMaki Charting widget library and Java and PHP samples can be downloaded from jMaki Charting dowload page. The details to participate as a user or contributor are available on the Community Page.

Following up on their article New: Mercurial Repositories for JDK 7, Javalobby has posted a brief interview, Why is Mercurial Useful for JDK 7? "Let's ask Kelly O'Hair, senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems and the project's primary build architect, what's particularly useful about Mercurial in the context of JDK 7."

The owners of the Educational Management School Information System (EMSIS) tell us they're "the most ambitious Open Source project in Lebanon!" Explaining further, they say, "after more that 12 years of unsuccessful trying to develop a national distributed EMIS and SIS system. We just lunch the EMSIS Open Source Project with only one ambition "Have the system working in less that a year!!" The project will contain at least some basic modules such as: student registration and enrollment, human resource module, grading and student follow up, school facility management, course management system, and tools for parents."

In today's Forums, osbald considers the implications of the New Control Styles available within J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.5. "Not particularly related to SwingX but I found this quite an interesting read. Technical Note TN2196 New Control Styles available within J2SE 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.5: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2007/tn2196.html. How do people feel about this (abuse?) of client properties? Would look rather odd on another platform/PLAF. Worth a look if you're thinking about new components or new features for our existing ones."

a_laksmana wonders about the existence of any tutorial on making jmaki widgets? "I need some components made like listbox. Is there any tutorial available? Is there any repository where people who make their custom widget could submit and perhaps his/her creation could be included in jmaki pack? I wish jmaki could be integrated with vwp and auto set."

Finally, prunge considers the implications of after-the-fact API changes in Re: Backwards compatibility, adding 'throws' to an object constructor. "If such a change (adding checked Exception to method or constructor in public API) were made, I would consider it not backward compatible. Binaries would still run - that is if a customer had their code compiled against your old API (without the checked exception) but run against your new code (with the checked exception) it would still run. However, if your new API code actually threw a checked exception the customer code would not catch it and this exception would get propogated upwards unless they are catching java.lang.Exception or java.lang.Throwable. I'm guessing this is because the JVM, as opposed to the compiler, does not know the difference between checked and unchecked exceptions. The customer's source code, as you said, will not compile against the new version of your API since it now declares a checked exception. So ultimately, adding a checked exception to a public API method or constructor should not be considered a backward compatible change."

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Is Android too good to be true?
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