What would be an alternative from the developers point of view?

I wrote three mobile apps in the last few weeks. The Symbian.org widget using Symbian Web Runtime, a Mirror app using front camera with J2ME and a visual Hello world with a Symbian logo graphics in Symbian C++. There is no comparison – J2ME still offers unparalleled tools, elegance and portability. Web Runtime is great but suffers from many teething problems and does not even try to be portable to other plaforms.

Granted, there are some problems with J2ME – and licensing is perhaps the most important of them. However, most other problems discussed are not as acute as they have been made out to be – especially compared to other environments.

But let\’s set that aside for the moment and look at the other side of the coin. What\’s good about J2ME and why it had huge success in drawing crowds of developers:

- J2ME is the ONLY runtime environment with a consistent specification and usable feature set which also allows targetting very large numbers of phones from different manufacturers
- There is diversity in implementations but this is dealt with by efforts such as J2ME Polish (see j2mepolish.org)
- There is an immense number of resources available for J2ME – documentation, books, sample code, snippets etc.
- Development tools are plenty and mostly free
- For many models J2ME is the only way to deliver applications
- There is a huge pool of skilled developers
- The investment into J2ME has been huge – for developers, manufacturers and operators alike.

These last two should be read and re-read carefully. Poking developers and publishers who have invested into J2ME with \’letting j2me die\’ won\’t help Symbian. There is no question that J2ME will remain in handsets of most manufacturers – including those who use Symbian – for many years to come. It is simply too valuable and too useful to be dismissed.

Unfortunately, being in the US where S60 penetration is extremely low, you’re not likely to get local apps. However, for Skype you should try the native Fring client on S60, it’s very much better than Skypelite.

I’m currently the Community Manager for Sony Ericsson Developer World but this is all my personal opinion. I have been working with mobile Java since 2004. For Sony Ericsson it has always been extremely important to reduce fragmentation problems for developers as much as possible.

That was a problem that we focused a lot of resources on and I think we succeeded fairly well, building a consistent platform that developers can trust works the same on different phones from us and as close as possible to phones from other vendors.

And, looking back, things _have_ improved throughout the industry. There are excellent UI frameworks available and the early bugs in the phones have been fixed. I think we all can agree that if you build a Canvas-based midlet that only uses networking it will run on most devices out there with few, if any, modifications. Right?

The problems are mostly in some areas of some JSRs. They are unfortunate, but one has to remember the incredible growth of the Java platform on mobile in a relatively short period of time. That is growth both in terms of volume and in terms of features. In 2004 color displays were still uncommon and only a few phones had cameras in them. The web browsers were quite frankly a joke and the multimedia capabilities laughable compared to todays standard. And that was just 5 years (and about a billion or so phones) ago!

So, yes, there are problems, but there are also parts working good and stable.

Looking ahead, I think what the current app store successes have taught us is that a complete ecosystem requires 1) a consistent platform with a large enough install base 2) good developer tools and 3) a deployment and payment mechanism that makes it easy for the end user to find and purchase applications (aka an app store).

Java ME is strong in 1 and 2 but has been lacking in 3. As I said, this is my personal opinion, but it’s clear that Sony Ericsson (and, may I add, the rest of the industry with us) focused very much on #1 and too little on #3.

That is now changing. We’re improving our application shop and so are other vendors. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is getting in to place.

The future for mobile applications is extremely bright and Java ME is still by far the largest platform out there with arguably the best developer tools, frameworks, books – and developers. Add that third and oh so important last piece of the puzzle to that and I think you will have a very fertile ecosystem that will bring many opportunities for its’ inhabitants in the years ahead.

Symbian Foundation could come to terms with its developers at EPFL and help shape Scala’s future while promoting mobile and embedded applications.

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I hope to see a Symbian future based on Qt (for native, mission-critical applications) and Scala/Lift (for everything else). Widgets and scripts could complete the picture!

As an open operating system driven by an open community, it would be difficult for anyone to eliminate Java without the wholehearted backing of the community.

Even if the community took that bold step, there is nothing to stop the creation of an Open Source Java implementation under the Eclipse Public License – although there would still be a few TCK issues to sort out…. Equally, the Eclipse Public license allows commercial innovation on top of the platform, leaving the door open to manufacturers to add Java or direct-to-consumer solutions.

I completely agree with your first comment. Java is very strong in the enterprise space and has found good niches with consumers. This is why Java is consistently popular as a programming language and why there is an unrelenting desire from the mobile industry to tap into Java’s huge community of developers.

HTML5 and Gears…watch out for my next posting…

Rob

I’m planning to address web runtimes in my next posting, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet…

In the context of this posting; the ubiquity, features and relatively unconstrained innovation in the browser-space is a significant threat to Java – especially for quick, fun applications. HTML5 goes one step further in augmenting the “rich client” experience inside the browser. Equally, the JavaScript performance race is well and truly underway, which can only be a good thing for web programmers.