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Java coming to the iPhone?

Many developers were keeping close track of last Thursday's release of a public SDK for the iPhone (and iPod Touch, and presumably similar devices from Apple in the future). To the Java developer, this seems like competition for the many ME devices out there, but maybe it's actually an opportunity? It's certainly a game-changer.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast offers a panel from January's Mobile & Embedded Developer Days. Java Mobility Podcast 38: Developing and deploying content in the real world listens in to the MEDD Panel session "Developing and Deploying Content in the Real World." It is a frank discussion amongst large and small application developers, OEMs, device manufacturers, carriers, and tool vendors. In one prescient moment -- around 33:16 in this podcast episode -- Rusty Baker, Director of Studio/Film/Content Licensing for Motorola, talks about the iPhone SDK announcement and the effect it would likely have on the mobile industry:

"I actually personally feel... I'm not speaking for Motorola... but I personally feel that things that are happening around the carriers opening up their networks is a more interesting factor, a more destabilizing factor in our territory, in the U.S market right now. And so I actually think some of the most exciting things that are happening are just from the announcements from Apple earlier this month, because it marks a new step for carriers in terms of opening up other ways of reaching their consumers. I think we all should watch that. And we are. We are at Motorola, I'm sure Nokia is also. Because that will create new opportunities and new ways for all of us to bring new solutions to market, and to restructure the way that we're working in this market."

A more open market with more access to the existing handsets and carriers is something that everyone at the MEDDs wanted, and if that's a side effect of the iPhone announcement, it's great news. And the fact that the iPhone SDK opens up opportunities for iPhone-specific developers is obvious. But what if you have an existing ME app and aren't inclined to start over with Apple's completely different tools and APIs? Well, there may be a very interesting opportunity there too...

According an InfoWorld article, "Sun Microsystems is developing a Java Virtual Machine for Apple's iPhone and plans to release the JVM some time after June, enabling Java applications to run on the popular mobile device."

The JVM is to be based on the Java Micro Edition (ME) version of Java, said Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, on Friday afternoon. Apple had not shown interest in enabling Java to run on the iPhone, but Sun plans to step in and do the job itself after having pondered Thursday's release of an SDK for the iPhone by Apple.

So there you go. It's too soon to know specifics, but with any luck, ME developers will be able to get their apps on the iPhone too.

Also in Java Today, A. Sundararajan's weblog introduces BTrace - a dynamic tracing tool for Java. "Are you interested in a byte code instrumentation (BCI) based dynamic tracing solution for the Java platform? If so, please visit https://btrace.dev.java.net. BTrace is a safe, dynamic tracing solution for Java. You can express tracing code in Java and run it against a running Java application. Your Java application should be running on JDK 6 or above for BTrace to work."

The latest edition, issue 161, of the JavaTools Community Newsletter talks about how to publicize your project via the newsletter, rounds up tool-related news from around the web, announces a new project in the community and a new release from the Genesis project, and offers a Tool Tip with a good reference for JavaScript development.

Jean-Francois Arcand announces the latest version of Jersey in today's Weblogs. In Vrrrrrooommm: Jersey 0.6 released...with Grizzly 1.7.2!, he writes, "today the Jersey community has released version 0.6....with support for Grizzly 1.7.2 and its new Request/Response API!"

In Grails application now working on GlassFish v3, Vivek Pandey writes, "recently Guillaume reported to me that his Grail app is not working with the recently released GlassFish v3 Preview 2, I took the discussion to GlassFish mailing list, see the discussion here and the corresponding bug. The good news is that Jerome quickly found out what the problem was and after the code went thru reviews, it was checked in and the fix went into yesterday's nightly build."

Are the best closures no closures? Bruce Chapman offers up code in Anouncement - "No Closures" prototype: "It is with pleasure that I announce the availability of a prototype for "No Closures"."

This week's Spotlight is on Project Open JBI Components. Its overall goal is to foster community-based development of JBI components that conform to the Java Business Integration specification (JSR 208). You can join this project as a JBI component developer or as part of an existing JBI component development team. Starting your own component project is relatively straightforward: you have the option to create your JBI component project as a regular Java.Net project. Joining an established development team might take a little longer and require additional approvals.

In today's Forums, ocoro02 asks GlassFish users about lifecycle-module & classpath. "Got some newbie questions on Lifecycle Modules under Sun App Server 9.0/9.1. I find I have to explicitly define classpath when I deploy a lifecycle-module to ${com.sun.aas.instanceRoot}/lib. The deployment docs seem to suggest this classpath is included and doesn't need to be specified? I would have thought if any path was inferred, the domain specific lib dir would be the most likely candididate to take precedence over anything else? What's the <domaindir>/applications/lifecycle-modules/ directory for?"

arctanx starts off an interesting career-oriented thread by asking Move in to architect role..how? "I've been a java developer for some time, I'd like to try to transition into an architect type role. Has anyone done that and can share their experience? What are some things I can start doing to make the transition. Also, if someone is not interested in management, what is the next progression up the ladder after developer...sr. developer? architect? Please share."

Finally, francoislionet works around BD-J implementation issues in the thread Re: Frame Accurate Animation. "I looked at my notes from the Barcelona conference, and I found what Mark Johnson said about Frame Accurate Animation. He said that it was badly implemented on some players. Kind of scary statement. So to be on the safe side, I decided to use a simple method of creating a thread with the animation loop. It works very well (except that the animation stalls sometimes when the player is loading data, but I guess there is nothing that can be done against it)."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

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Comments

• Hello Chris, another nice entry around Java/iPhone in David (Sun SPOT)'s blog. He shows some tech details around iPhone and also about possibilities to put Squawk..

  http://blogs.sun.com/davidgs/entry/java_on_the_iphone

  Posted by: brunogh on March 10, 2008 at 03:53 PM

• Okay, so SUN is taking the initiative to bring Java to the iPhone, great. Now let's take some initiative and bring the ME dev environment to OS X. I don't want to have to use Parallels or VMWare anymore.

  Posted by: bainfu on March 10, 2008 at 10:47 PM

• It's very insteresting article, I will translate it in Turkish tell my friends.
  saç ekimisaç ekimievden eve nakliyat
  evden eve nakliyat

  Posted by: laksoy on May 10, 2008 at 10:50 AM

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