A brief update on what's happening this year at JavaOne in the Mobile device space, the domain I was most interested in? One major announcement - although not completely unexpected - was the convergence of J2ME platforms and variations into one single Mobile Service Architecture implemented through 2 stacks. JSR-248 defines a low-budget, but less flexible mass-market device; JSR-249 defines the functionality for mid to high end devices style SmartPhone with enhanced levels of manageability. It is exactly this manageability that will be one of the challenges for the next few years. With so many (legacy) variations in the market dealing with embedded software deployment will become an increasingly complex issue. JSR-233 (J2EE Mobile Device Management and Monitoring Specification) and JSR-246 (Device Management APPI) define java interfaces to management systems, the latter for the device, the former for integrating management functions into the back-end infrastructure. JSR-233 extends JSR-124 J2EE Client Provisioning (also known as ?The Vending Machine?)

JSR-232 (Mobile Operation Management) defines embedded service interaction and is based on the OSGi industry standard (http://www.osgi.org). This specification will allow concurrent embedded applications to be deployed in such a way that component dependencies and access control are preserved. This runtime model is currently used by vendors such as Nokia on SmartPhones, SiemensVDO and IBM in Telematics and on residential gateways by e.g. Motorola. Wednesdays keynote showcased both Nokia and IBM showing tools facilitating the development of such applications.

JSR-179 (Location API for J2ME) nicely abstracts the need embedded applications might have for locating themselves from the underlying implantations. Devices (such as phones) might get location data from the network, the local cell and/or (Assisted)GPS. What counts is the desired interval and the required quality of service. Initialization of the GPS (fixing) might take more time then a user might expect (minutes!) and some programming techniques should be applied to work around the latency and storage issues inherent to mobile devices.

One session had an interesting analysis on the current state of the art: MIDP 1 was nice but not realy useful for real application deployment due limited API availability and the lack of security. MIDP 2 solves most of these problems and can very well be used for corporate application. However, for end-user services the deployment is very complicated and for now in practice only possible though the network provider. Read: Business to Consumer will need to be resolved by widely implementing the management API's mentioned earlier in this summary.

What was missing for me this year? Automotive/Telematics. Java will hit the Blu-Ray/Multimedia market before it will proliferate to our cars... It once seemed to be the other way around....