All Palm Tungstens will now ship with the JVM (Java Virtual Machine),
which means that Java programmers can now write directly to these
handhelds (with no need to download the jvm - an annoying and
debilitating thing when you want to easily reach end-users).
Because of IBM and Palm's new alliance to extend and solidify Palm's
dominance in the enterprise, it is essential for developers (whether
java, palm, or other) to see what opportunities might be lurking behind
these events.
For Java programmers, Why write to Palms?
http://www.blueboard.com/j2me/stats.htm#palm
http://www.blueboard.com/j2me/why.htm#pda
For Palm programmers, what's Java's J2ME? Why should I write in J2ME?
http://www.blueboard.com/j2me/intro.htm
http://www.blueboard.com/j2me/why.htm
today's headlines:
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupda...914374,00.html
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In one of the first moves to demonstrate that Palm Solutions Group (the
hardware guys) and operating-system spinout PalmSource (the software
guys) are two autonomous companies, Palm Solutions Group (PSG) has
announced that it will be making a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) available
for all of its Tungsten handheld offerings: the Bluetooth-enabled "T,"
the wireless wide area network-enabled "W," and the Wi-Fi enabled "C."
The change in strategy also affects the T2, a successor to the Tungsten
T that was launched last week.
The reason this announcement demonstrates the autonomy between the two
formerly married organizations is that PalmSource is so far content to
live without Java. For Palm users, however, including a JVM means access
to more enterprise, and consumer, applications.
PalmSourceCEO David Nagel has repeatedly insisted that the Palm OS
ecosystem can continue to thrive and grow without including a JVM as a
standard component.
In a recent interview, Nagel told me he had no problem with providing
both development environments --- Palm OS and Java --- to developers.
"But Sun is very difficult to work with," said Nagel. "They do not make
it easy. We were one of the early members of the JCP [Java Community
Process]. We tried to build a PDA profile, sort of a Java 2 Micro
Edition (the mobile JVM) grown up a little bit. But we decided that was
sort of a bifurcation, and that it created more problems than it solved.
Sun didn't like it. They wouldn't support it, so we decided that we
weren't going to go through with it and that we would leave J2ME be." In
light of that, Nagel is content with the 19,000 applications he says are
available for the Palm OS (up from 12,500 from last year) and the
280,000 developers.
But PSG director of strategic alliances Chris Morgan wasn't satisfied.
In June, he struck a deal with IBM to include that company's version of
J2ME, known as WebSphere Micro Edition (WME, formerly known as "J9"), in
all Tungstens moving forward. The move means that PSG now gets to tap
into both the Palm OS and Java ecosystems, the latter weighing in at 3
million developers and growing. According to Morgan, "The way I look at
is, we now have 3,280,000 developers."
To the extent that developers are one of the three lynchpins (in
addition to applications and users/installations) to most ecosystems in
our industry, the Tungsten ecosystem appears to have gotten a
significant boost. For PSG, this is a smart move, particularly because
the Tungstens haven't been doing as well as the company had originally
hoped they would..
This is good news for Java developers, too. Prior to the announcement,
Java developers had limited access to the Palm market. If they wanted
their applications to run on the Palm OS, their only choice was to
redevelop their applications natively for the Palm platform, or to get
their target customers to buy, install, and configure a JVM from a third
party like Insignia. With this announcement, the "anywhere" part of the
Java promise --- the ability to write software once and deploy it
anywhere --- is closer to reality. The target for Java developers will
grow by the number of Tungstens that are in the market.
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