Bill Day's Blog

JavaOne Recap: An Evangelist's Perspective

Last week's JavaOne conference was very interesting for me. In the four years since the first part of what would become J2ME escaped from Sun Labs at JavaOne 1999 (happy 4th birthday, KVM!), the technology world has leapt forward from a wired, PC centric phase into the wireless device nirvana we've all been hoping for and writing about for years.

Or at least, that's what I'd like to believe. It is my job, after all, to believe such things. But is it true?

I decided to explore the edges of wireless possibility at this year's JavaOne. I set out to use a J2ME powered cell phone with a built in camera (a Nokia 3650, for the gadget fans amongst us ), to interactively blog on Mobility. The goal: Blogging not just text but also digipics, both submitted wirelessly from my cellcam to the Sun Developer Network Forums server.

The good news: I was able to moblog all four days of the conference with pictures taken on my 3650. Check out the results for an Evangelist's perspective on the conference: [Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4]

The bad news: The Forums server doesn't currently support MovableType or a similar public blogging API, so I had to hack things together myself. The down and dirty solution for last week was:

• Bluetooth the photos from my 3650 to my laptop
• Publish the resulting moblog pages to my site from my laptop, via SSH over WiFi (available with varying levels of success around the conference)

And so the quest for mobile nirvana continues. We're getting a lot closer, with technologies like J2ME and WiFi and Bluetooth continuing to help fill in the gaps, but there's much work to be done. I'm very excited to see how the Java community can help do it!

Epilogue: For future conferences, I've got something a bit more elegant and a lot more interesting in the works...watch for a new mobile blogging project, on java.net of course, coming soon.

Comments

• moblogging project
  Check out http://moblogger.org for a simple moblogging application. Simply e-mail the photos as attachments from your cell phone, and voila - they show up on your website. This project is still very new (and I'm the only developer currently), so feel free to join!

  Here's some samples I moblogged on my bike ride last night:
  http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20030618#pictures_from_white_ranch_yesterday

  Posted by: mraible on June 18, 2003 at 09:22 AM

• FYI: JavaOne 2003 moblog update
  My JavaOne 2003 moblog bits have moved to better fit within my new site structure.

  Access photos and commentary for Day 1 via:
  http://billday.com/Images/Blogged/JavaOne2003/J1.Day1/
  (click the links in the above page to go to day 2, 3, or 4 bits)

  For JavaOne 2004 and beyond, search for "JavaOne" on my site (click here to jump straight to the results).

  Posted by: billday on July 05, 2004 at 04:21 PM

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