Here is a preview (updated):

The old video is at http://www.youtube.com/v/ZvVx6RGjCjM

It will be easy to find Marge:

Here is the last tip, keep an eye on the Mobile and Embedded Wiki page for JavaOne!

I am very excited to meet new people! See you in San Francisco!

Bruno Ghisi

Here are some pics that I got from my terrible camera:

Ale Gomes, from Mobile & Embedded, and Fabiane Nardon, JavaTools Community Leader.

Bruno Souza, Javali, Brazilian Sun Ambassadors, OpenSolaris User Group... did I forgot anyone?

Marge checking out a mobile session with her MSA compliant device!

Lucas Torri, Roger Brinkley and I. Sorry model agencies... no runways, we are busy....

What a nice guy!

Roger Brinkley, Mobile and Embedded Community leader, playing golf during his cool session!

Bluetooth about:

The slides of the session Marge, an open source framework for building Bluetooth applications in Java are available only in pt_BR (pdf and odf). mOOo Impress Controller was used to control the Impress presentation with the mobile and Giant Blue Pong was the demo showed in the end. Thanks for the audience, sorry if we had to hurry up. If you got any doubts, please send an email to us (mailing lists here).

During fisl, we have discovered a very nice thing! Bluecove, a JSR 82 Java SE implementation, is already working over BlueZ, the official Linux Bluetooth protocol stack. There is no release yet, but the snapshots we have tried are stable. Thanks to Vlad Skarzhevskyy, one of the project owners, that virtually helped us to put things working for our demo. Now you can have multiple connections in Linux, something that AvetanaBluetooth (open source) did not allow. Great news! Congrats to the Bluecove team! :)

Thanks,

Bruno Ghisi

Figure 1: Sun SPOT rulez!!!

Downloading NetBeans IDE 6.1

Installing Sun SPOT plugin

Getting Sun SPOT SDK 3.0 Beta

Creating the Demo Application

    protected void startApp() throws MIDletStateChangeException {

        System.out.println("Hello, world");

        new BootloaderListener().start();   // monitor the USB (if connected) and recognize commands from host


        long ourAddr = Spot.getInstance().getRadioPolicyManager().getIEEEAddress();

        System.out.println("Our radio address = " + IEEEAddress.toDottedHex(ourAddr));

        ISwitch sw1 = EDemoBoard.getInstance().getSwitches()[EDemoBoard.SW1];

        leds[0].setRGB(100,0,0);                // set color to moderate red

        while (sw1.isOpen()) {                  // done when switch is pressed

            leds[0].setOn();                    // Blink LED

            Utils.sleep(250);                   // wait 1/4 seconds

            leds[0].setOff();

            Utils.sleep(1000);                  // wait 1 second

        }

        notifyDestroyed();                      // cause the MIDlet to exit

    }

Running the Demo Application in the emulator

Where I go next?

So, nothing better than show a video... [sometimes I think I should have done cinema :) ]... Anyway, if you have not seen any Marge videos yet, try "Project Marge Interview", "My laptop is detecting my presence" and "Giant Blue Pong (my Bluetooth Atari)". Too much talk, take a look at the new "Building a Java ME Bluetooth chat in 12 minutes..." too. Could you not understand what happened in Netbeans code editor? Neither do I!!! It is better to download the full video (30MB). Hope you enjoy!

If you want more about Marge, go to http://marge.dev.java.net. If you want to help, please send an email to owner@marge.dev.java.net. We would love to hear suggestions and have you in our team!

Go ahead! Marge your Bluetooth app!

Original:

Visual Mobile Designer Palette Reference Page

Everything you wanted to know about the Visual Mobile Designer for mobile applications, but were afraid to ask is now revealed. This page gives a complete description of all the components in the VMD palette and includes links to related tutorials for each of the components where available. Get the information you need to make effective use of all the functionality the Mobility pack delivers!

VMD rulez! Enjoy it!

Bruno Ghisi

I will try summarise my point of view, because I am not an expert on it. Brazilian open source middleware, called Ginga, is divided in two main parts: Ginga-ncl, which is uses a Brazilian scripting language called Lua (much used in embedded systems and games) and Ginga-j, which is supposed to be the Java stuff. As far as I know, Ginga-j is compatible with GEM (Globally Executable MHP) and it was having licenses and royalties problems. Also, it was being said that Ginga-j was open source, but things are not really clear, otherwise, probably, I would not being post this entry... how can you drive an open source project without clearity? Where can I download all the stuff? Where is the roadmap? So, Sun published that will help Forum do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre (Forum SBTVD) to create a new plataform that will take place at Ginga. The announcement says that this platform will be compatible with Ginga, so is it a replacement for Ginga-j? How will be that?

Hope anybody could elucidate us.

Cheers,
Bruno Ghisi

• Download Netbeans IDE 6 (Select All package version, because it comes with Java and Ruby).
• Get marge-core in Marge repository (you can use Netbeans to checkout from Subversion and generate a jar, because the last version is under development and was not launched yet, we are working on it :) ). Otherwise download the last launched version (0.4.0) and fix the inquiry method.
• Get a JSR 82 implementation, I have used Avetana for Linux. I have explained it in another post, you can take a look here.

1. Create a Ruby Project: File -> New Project -> Ruby -> Ruby Application. Click Next, configure your project (create a main.rb file and use a JRuby interpreter) and then click Finish.
2. Add marge-core and Avetana. Right click in the project -> Properties -> Java and then add the jars in the JRuby classpath.
3. Add the following code into main.rb. The code is pretty intuitive, because Ruby is! It basically imports some Marge classes (that are going to use Avetana internally), defines a listener that will be called during the inquiry and will print all the devices found. Also, the inquiry will be started by the singleton DeviceDiscoverer.



include Java

include_class 'net.java.dev.marge.inquiry.DeviceDiscoverer'
include_class 'net.java.dev.marge.inquiry.InquiryListener'

puts 'Inquiring for Bluetooth Devices'
discoverer = DeviceDiscoverer.instance;

class InquiryListenerAppender 
    include InquiryListener
  def inquiryCompleted(remoteDevices)
    remoteDevices.each { |device| print "#{device.bluetooth_address} - #{device.get_friendly_name true} \n"  }
  end
  def inquiryError
    puts 'Inquiry Error'
  end
  def deviceDiscovered(device,deviceClass)
  end
end

discoverer.start_inquiry_giac InquiryListenerAppender.new

• Apime
• byblos
• Fire (Flexible Interface Rendering Engine)
• J2ME Lightweght Visual Component Library (LwVCL)
• J4ME: Java For Me
• jMobileCore
• kUI
• MWT (Micro Window Toolkit)
• Nextel's Open Source J2ME Toolkits
• Thinlet
• Synclast UI API

• TWUIK
• J2ME Polish
• TinyLine 2D
• Paxmodept

This is my first entry in 2008 and I wish an amazing year for everybody!

Sean O'Sullivan, the CTO of Rococo Software, is going to present a session called "Past, Present and Future of JSR 82 (Java Bluetooth APIs)" in Mobile & Embedded Developer Days. Don't miss that, registration is still open! If you, unfortunately, won't be able to travel to California and be in the event, check the live broadcast as well.

He lovely gave us an email interview/preview... here we go:

Short Bio

As the CTO of Rococo, Sean drives the company's technical strategy and vision. Background is in middleware and distributed systems. From a technical perspective, his interests are distributed systems, embedded software, and the space where the web meets the plain old telephony system.

Rococo Story

Rococo was founded in 2000, and began exploring potential product applications in the (then new) Mobile Java arena. Focused on Java and Bluetooth at the end of 2000, and then applied for and was accepted as members of the JSR82 Expert Group. We then helped work on defining JSR82 in the standards group, following the JCP process, while in parallel, we worked on creating a set of tools that supported the standard, as well as our own OEM, licence-able version of the standard.

Our short set of milestones since then:

Mar 02: Launched our Bluetooth Simulator on the same day the JSR82 standard was completed at Java World
Jun 02: Released our Linux DevKit
Q4 02: Launched our Technology Licensing Kit (TLK) - OEM source-code product for companies wishing to add JSR82 support to their devices.
Q1 2003: First commercial deal for our TLK with Ericsson Technology Licensing (a big deal for us - ETL was then the leading Bluetooth Stack Provider in the world!)
Q3 2003: Licensed TLK to Aplix to include JSR82 in their Java Virtual Machine - another big deal for us, due to their penetration in the mobile handset industry
Q3 2005: Licensed to Esmertec to include JSR82 in their Java Virtual Machine - another key milestone, demonstrating growing acceptance for JSR82 in the Java Virtual Machine business, and JSR becoming a requirement in mid-range handsets
2006-2007: Large scale deployments of Rococo's JSR82 technology via our licensing deals, sees our software ship on Motorola, Sony Ericsson and other handsets. Shipments grow to over 100 million units.
2008: Rococo now investing more in JSR82 technology, porting to new platforms, and proposing potential follow-on standards to JSR82

Why Bluetooth? Why Java?

Bluetooth:
When we analysed the technology back in 2000, we very much liked it's potential ubiquity. By virtue of its design goals, and the vision of the SIG, Bluetooth was always intended to be a short-range wireless standard that could be in many, many devices "close to us" : phones, sensors, set top boxes, home gateways, cars, watches etc. We thought this was very exciting, and had the potential to unleash a significant wave of innovation for applications and services that work "around you" - in the home, in the car, amongst "your stuff". I think we're only really seeing that come to pass now in 2008. And if you look at the new stuff in Bluetooth (low power and high bandwidth in UWB), I think we'll see some fantastic applications arrive in the shops over the next 12-18 months.

Java:
With Java - we bought its potential as an application delivery and execution platform that could go "anywhere". We studied it, and - even accepting the potential limits of the "write once run everywhere" vision, we believed it would be one of the only standards-based platform technologies to really penetrate devices, machines, consumer electronics.

We thought the combination of both technologies was potentially a great fit. And so the focus on JSR82 was natural for us, and has been a niche in terms of focus, but a good niche! :-)

What do you think about possible improvements into the current JSR 82?

There are many areas in which JSR82 could be improved. To be fair to it - it was originally designed to provide some basic, core APIs for Bluetooth in Java, and to quite an extent, it slavishly followed the existing Bluetooth Stack functionality, and stayed away from trying to ad ease-of-use, or higher level abstractions for developers etc. In a way - this was a good thing - it didn't try to do too much - it just focused on getting an initial, functional and useful set of APIs delivered and adopted in the market. That's now happened, and it's time to take a look at what else could be added or provided as enhancements to the core standard. I think there are potentially three main areas for consideration:

1) Admin/housekeeping/helper classes
2) APIs for common application areas
3) New APIs to expose some of the new functionality coming available with the new capabilities in Bluetooth (UWB, ULP, NFC etc)

In the first case, for example, as you have done with the Marge project, you have provided some really useful ease-of-use abstractions for common things that most developers need to do when using JSR82. These are exactly the kinds of higher level services that might be appropriate in a new version of the standard, or in a follow-on standard that builds on JSR82.

In the second case, I think there's scope for some common APIs to cover, for example, gaming (scoreboard management, player join and leave, in-game communication,) medical (APIs for sensing, storing, sharing specific health care data acquired by a local device), automotive (OSGi integration plus other common automotive specific APIs) and metering. These are just some of our thoughts - I'm sure other people can suggest some other compelling application-specific APIs, which could be defined and significantly lower the bar for new application development in these areas.

Finally, it's definitely time to take a good look at what the Ultra Low Power (ULP ) and Ultra WideBand (UWB) developments in Bluetooth could mean for application developers. With these capabilities, we're seeing Bluetooth move into Set Top Boxes, Machine-2-Machine (M2M) and sensor-based areas, among others. It's like that we could define new APIs that enable developers to take maximum advantage of the new capabilities becoming available in Bluetooth, and now is the time to start planning and defining those APIs.

How do you see the future of Java/Bluetooth integration and JSR 82?

Right now - we're pleased with the extent of the deployment of JSR82, primarily in phones. Rococo also has seen its implementation used in well over 100 million phones to date.

We're now beginning to see it also being used in these new areas: M2M communication, Set Top Boxes and Home Gateways, and in medical applications and in the car. I think the potential for the standard, and any follow-on, is very strong, as the number of devices that will have both Bluetooth and Java on-board is only going one way : up! :-) Any time both technologies are present of the same device, there's a pretty strong case for including JSR82. If you look at the general market dynamics for Java (especially mobile Java) and for Bluetooth, I think it's clear we're only at the early stages of the potential deployment and usage of the Java/Bluetooth standard.

You are going to present a very interesting session in Developer Days, how will be that? What your audience can expect?

Yes - I'm still writing my slides at the minute - so ask me later! :-)

Seriously: we were delighted to be accepted to give a talk at the conference - it's a brilliant line up of talks over the few days. We're going to just cover some background to JSR82, to explain a little bit of history to the standard, and then talk about where JSR82 might go down the line. I'll probably cover some thoughts on what's good and what needs improvement in the standard, and maybe mention Android if there's time. As I say - ask me later :-)

Anything else you may want to say?

Thanks for the opportunity to say a few words. Your blog is always excellent - and we're fans of the work you guys have been doing with Marge!

Wow!!! Great content! Don't forget to keep an eye in Rococo's Weblog too.

Cheers,
Bruno Ghisi

It's Friday! It's already December! What a great day to write about OpenOffice.org, which is lovely abbreviated as OOo. A lot of people have asked me about how mOOo Impress Controller was built. I am not too old yet - getting older this Sunday :) - but I have some stories to tell.

In the begining of this year, I was at fisl 8.0 (International Free Software Forum)*, which is one of the biggest open source Latin America conferences and happens in the south of Brazil. If you like to talk about software, open source, Linux, culture, meet people, etc, etc, etc you should be there once! The 8th edition was definitely very special, I have met a lot of nice people, including people from Mobile & Embedded Community and Louis Suarez Potts. Please, froze this part, because we will get back here later, but now I have to start a new paragraph. As you can see, this post looks like that crazy movies that goes forward and reward, starts from the end... yeah, and this entry really starts from the end, if you have looked in the RSS description, I have written "You can develop extensions for your OpenOffice.org suite... with Java! Wow! There is a huge community around it, plugins to make your life easy, good documentation... so, what are you waiting for?!"... don't worry, we will get there.

At that time of fisl 8.0, I had a very experimental demo running on Eclipse. The demo was made of two applications written in Java: a mobile (Java ME/MIDP) and a desktop (Java SE) one. The mobile was able to communicate, over Bluetooth, with the desktop side and the both used a XML protocol to interact. So, the mobile was able to navigate through the desktop file system, filtering for all the Impress OOo presentations that was being found. Also, the mobile was able to send a request to start a presentation file and after started, it was able to control the presentation, advancing and going back in the slides. It was something like that, but, as you guys know Murphy's Law, things are not always perfect and I can guarantee things get worse when you deal with demo applications. Anyway, the demo was not completely integrated with OOo, it was a just a demo invoking OOo Api. So, regarding what I have said in the last paragraph, I have met Louis and he was the guy that has gave the motivation to create a real OOo extension, after he has explained more about what was that, how Java would help that and son on.

After the event, Lucas Torri and I have completely rewritten that demo as an Add-On extension, which later was called mOOo Impress Controller. So, we are now in the main part of this entry: you can easily create OOo extensions in Java. I said easily! There are plugins for Eclipse and for Netbeans IDE (help localizing it to your language). Basically, to put any of those plugins working, you just need to install an OOo SDK and also have an OOo suite or any other compatible installed, for example, StarOffice. Just be careful with the versions to keep things working fine. Get started now! Here it goes very useful links:

• OpenOffice.org Api
• OpenOffice.org Wiki
• OpenOffice.org Developer's Guide
• GullFOSS (OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun's Blog)
• Subscribe in the extensions user list
• Subscribe in the extensions dev list
• Article from Netbeans Magazine Issue 3: OpenOffice.org NetBeans Integration (Great to start, it is pretty easy to deal with those wizards described!)
• OpenOffice.org Extensions repository (Many nice extensions appearing every day!)

Go ahead! Make something that looks like your way! Automate any task that you always wanted in your suite! Make something different! Let me know!!!

Have a great weekend!

Bruno Ghisi

They came to Caravana Tecnológica GUJava/SC, an event promoted by GUJava/SC, a JUG in the state of Santa Catarina, and Sun Microsystems. Some institutions also have collaborated with the event, such as CERTI Foundation, Informatic and Statistics Departament at Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and OpenS. The event was realized at UFSC last week and had around 120 people subscribed and distributed in the two days. The subscription was a kilo of food for each day period. This food will be donate for charity and I think - we still have to count - we got something near two hundred kilos, which is great!

In the first day, we had three sessions and two of them were about Mobile & Embedded. I have presented one about Java ME with Netbeans Mobility Pack and Mobile & Embedded Community and Lucas Torri have explained and demonstrated Sun SPOT. Also, we had a last one about agile management/development with Scrum and eXTreme Programming, that was presented by Leandro Rodrigo Saad Cruz, Klaus Wuestefeld and Sandro Bihaiko.

The second day was pretty awesome and we had Tim Jacobson talking about OpenSolaris and Sun Studio Tools in the morning and Tim Boudreau about Java and Netbeans in the afternoon. Maurício Leal also talked about Netbeans Mobility Pack and Sun SPOT in the afternoon too. The audience was very impressed with Sun SPOT! After that, people have done a list of questions and we had some answers and discussion based on that list. Another cool thing, Maurício Leal was translating the sessions simultaneously, a nice initiative to help people that can not understand English perfectly. While people were in the sessions, during the afternoon, Eduardo Lima, Sun Ambassador´s coordinator in Brazil, and Lucas Torri, the new fresh Sun Ambassador, talked with some professors about possible partnerships and about SAI (Sun Academic Initiative), among other things.

Thanks for all the people that have participated and helped in some way to make it happens! Thank you! Before I leave you with some pics, here are two tips - that was being discussed in a jug-leaders thread - if you want to create a JUG event and do not have the right tools:

• Try JUGEvents, that is being developed by JUG Padova, and allows you to easily add an event and people can easily subscribe. It is a nice common JUG events repository!


• Try Footprint, an open source certificate generator for JUG events, created by Felipe Gaúcho. It is pretty easy to use. Basically, you have to create a certificate template, configure a XML file and put the application to run and, after that, people will receive the certificate by email.

Also, they were discussing, in the thread, possible plans to integrate Fooprint in JUGEvents. Great!

According to Matt Thompson, in an email to Aaron Houston, fowarded to Java Champions list,

"Rather than just a redesign, the team responsible (consisting of a team led by Jill Welch and our SDN content team, joined with the .SUN org, and software mktg org) created a model for us to be able to continue to evolve this site to meet the needs of both Sun's traditional developer base and the new developers we are trying to attract as we move forward.

Next steps:
This is only the first step. Over the next 12 months we are planning on integrating more community infrastructure underneath SDN (thus enabling better community engagement, community contributions, discussions, etc.)".

Wow! Great start! If you are starting in the Java world or if you are already a developer, SDN is definitly a good place to find great content and get involved! Keep an eye in the videos, blogs, articles, tips... also, check the Mobility Topics in SDN! ;)

So here is the second part of the title, if you are also looking for Java ME, do not forget to explore Mobile & Embedded Community, there are great open source projects (if you got an idea of project, you can host on it or you can also link your project, if it is hosted in another place), podcasts, forums, blogs... and we do have a wiki with a lot of nice content, and specially one for the ME Application Developers Project, which contains interesting applications, take a look in how they were made! In addition, recently, I have made some updates in the JSR 82 wiki page and it can be a nice place if you want to start with Java/Bluetooth. So, you can contribute with us in the way you want, maybe in the forums, improving the current wiki, helping in the projects... we are looking foward it!

This post was all about community! Simple!

Have a great weekend!
Bruno Ghisi

Fill the form below and submit your ideas to submissions@developerdays.dev.java.net.

Subject Line: <Presentation format> - <Title>

Title: <insert your title here>
Format: <technical session, panel, lightening talk, poster presentation, hands-on talk>
Target Audience: <Intermediate or Advanced> 
Abstract: <keep it short - we all have other jobs ;-)>
Bio: <short biography of the speaker. Web pages, blogs, past speaking, etc>

Check some suggestions and other stuff in the Developers Day wiki page. Also, there is a nice podcast about the conference, and recently, some Community Stars have made a round table podcast and have talked a little about it too.

Go now!

What I can say is that the event was great! And the ME track too! We got great speakers talking about a lot of different mobile subjects and also great project authors interacting with people, like Floggy team. One thing that I have noticed was that there were a lot of developers interested in ME during the sessions, which is fantastic! It looks that we are growing fast and fast! Another cool stuff was the JustJava mobile application, people could easily install it in a stand and quickly check the sessions timetable! Neto Marin is working on it to publish here in Mobile & Embedded Community as an open source project. In the end of the day, after the sessions, we also got Muvucas, which was an informal conversation with a group of people talking about interesting subjects in different rooms. So nice!

Lucas Torri and I have presented a direct and objective session about Bluetooth, JSR 82 and Project Marge. We have used mOOo Impress Controller to control our OpenOffice.org Impress presentation with the mobile, while being aware of the time that was running. Basically, mOOo IC is a Swing Impress Add-On (desktop) and a Java ME client (mobile) that communicates over Bluetooth to change slides (I can talk about it and OOo extensions in another post). In the end of our session, we have showed the Giant Blue Pong demo! Remember Atari Pong Game? Yeah, something like it! You definitely do not need those new video games to have fun with Bluetooth controllers... all you need is Java! We have "made" (it is not finished and probably never will, it is a demo!) a Java SE game and a Java ME application to control the pad in the game. So, we have projected the game in the screen (and it became so BIGGG!) and invited two guys in the auditorium to play against each other using the two mobiles, each guy was controlling a pad. It was really funny to see people participating! In the end of the game we gave some t-shirts and Netbeans CDs (thanks Sun Brazil for that), so nobody lose. There is a video in portuguese, made in the end of the first day by Robison Brito, that shows we playing it. The game was not working perfect at the time the video was made, we have fixed some bugs and accelerated the ball movements after that, but you can get a picture of what was the Giant Blue Pong. I've posted, above, a photo during the session (Eduardo Guerra, "MundoJava" magazine editor is in the left playing with the mobile :) ).

Unfortunately, I could not stay in the event until the last day (Friday), which is bad, because there were nice sessions that I would like to attend... but I came back earlier for a good reason: my graduation! It will be tomorrow! So, my next post will be as a new grad :) Thanks for all the people I have met in JustJava 2007! You guys rock! JustJava 2007 was awesome! Congrats for everybody that helped to organize it!

Have a great weekend!

Bruno Ghisi