Friday July 15, 2005 CNET writes once, spreads fear uncertainty and doubt everywhere
CNET has an article that the Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) concept is not working for Java ME on cell phones. See: Java ME WORA not working on cell phones There's a definite bias to the article concentrating on the Java ME technology as the cause of WORA not working, with just a small mention of the cause being due to the disparate hardware of all cell phones in the world. However, the problems are really mainly caused by the differences in hardware. That's one thing CNET doesn't get right. If you look at the PC world, you see just one hardware architecture: Intel based x86 with Microsoft based Windows operating system (from this other single H/W standards spawn out such as XVGA, PCI, ISA, ATA, USB, Firewire etc., etc.). For cell phones you have different CPUs, different screen resolutions, different operating systems, different keypad softkeys, different everything). Any software, not just Java ME technology would have problems with that mess. The key is to unify (and commoditize the hardware) of a cell phone into 3 standard H/W profiles: high volume, smartphone, and enterprise phone. Only then will you get Java ME technology able to give the developer WORA. You'll notice that Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, etc. will blame the Java ME technology, though. Get Taiwan or China to churn out billions of cheap commodity standard clone cell phones, and you'll see Java ME really give software developers an awesome homogenous programming environment that kicks butt. This is the dirty secret cell phone industrusty doesn't want you to know. They instead want hardware lock-in to their specific (profitable for them) hardware. Don't let them fool you. Recipe for success: Clone it cheap, slap on standard embedded Linux and Java ME software, make millions in cell phones. |
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Whilst you have a point, I think the core of the problem lies with the original MIDP 1.0 specification. It was appalling. It was clearly drafted by people who knew nothing about coding video games, for instance. Just look at the fact that there was no way of creating/manipulating an image via the raw RGB values (or even palette values). No-one could create decent quality product using that specification. There was _no_ sound! So the likes of Nokia had no choice but to retro-fit a slightly better graphics API to it.
It could be argued that there was no sound because all the different handsets out there have vastly different audio capabilities, but they can all do at the very least two things: they can play tones (MIDI or even simple tones), and they have audio codecs, so they can play compressed sampled audio. Neither of these was deemed fit for MIDP 1.0.
There is actually a fairly limited range of mobile handset hardware out there. Most manufacturers stick to one of a handful of common chipsets. The main hardware differences are cosmetic: screen layout, keypad layout. Add-ons like camera, video, MP3, etc, etc, are not particularly relevant to mainstream apps development in MIDP.
But you're right about OSes - there are probably more mobile OSes than PC ones.
(And in China they _are_ knocking out billions (100s of millions, anyway) of cheap commodity handsets. And they run J2ME. But it doesn't have the Nokia extensions so it's still a bit limited.)Posted by Lee Dowthwaite on July 19, 2005 at 03:15 PM PDT #
Hi Lee,
Good points. OK, so let's get all the cell phone manufacturers to at least all standardize on embedded Linux.
Now, there's a contentious statement! ;-)
That along with layering on top a Verified Compatible Java ME piece would solve a big bulk of the WORA issues. If no one does it, there are plenty of companies in Asia who will. I can't wait! Java ME will be nice and consistent.
Hinkmond
Posted by Hinkmond Wong on July 19, 2005 at 04:12 PM PDT #