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News of ME's demise is greatly exaggerated
Tuesday October 30, 2007

So, a few days ago I catching up on my RSS feeds and ran into the following article Sun Scrapping Mobile Java, Moving Devices to Standard Java
which then led me to Sun starts bidding adieu to mobile-specific Java. Both of these articles really surprised me, considering I have just recently become a Java ME licensee.

Upon reading these articles, I took it upon myself to e-mail people that work with James Gosling to find out what was going on. One of the cool perks of working at Sun is that I can do this kind of thing and get an actual response back :) Here is part of the response I got:

   If Java ME could talk, it would quote Mark Twain and say that "the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

   We're working on clarifications for this dust up.

I was very happy to see that something was being done to clarify the situation. In fact a number of blogs and articles came up, in a more timely fashion than this post fortunately enough :)

One thing that did surprise me however, was that there was no direct mention that what is going on is not that Java ME is necessarily growing up, it is that the capabilities of devices using it today are growing. This does not mean that Java ME is dying, this means that Java ME is able to go down even lower into the device food chain. Remember that Java ME stands for Java Micro Edition. What has happened is that our view of what is Micro has changed from Mobile phones to smaller devices. What was once considered Micro is now capable of running Standard, and therefore Java SE makes good sense.

There will ALWAYS be a need for something smaller to be able to run on small things. The thing that is really cool in this space, is that as small things get to be more and more capable, this means that even smaller things are able to support more as well. This is where I see Java ME fitting in for a VERY long time, and where I plan to put all my effort into.

(2007-10-30 15:16:15.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/eric/entry/news_of_me_demise_is

Comments:

Sure the small devices are becoming more powerful, and as Java becomes ubiquitous it also becomes invisible. You don't notice that your phone is running Java unless you play a game that brings up a Java logo. But the large devices are also becoming more powerful, and the J2EE side keeps adding more capability too, so I don't think that any of the Java platforms will soon overtake another.

Posted by Walter Bays on October 30, 2007 at 03:32 PM PDT #

Help Wikipedia by expanding it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squawk_virtual_machine

Posted by 87.109.21.69 on January 25, 2008 at 11:04 PM PST #