My wishlist for open source Java ME
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006Motorola has recently announced that it will develop an open source Java ME implementation (MIDP 3) under the Apache license. This is the second open source Java ME announcement since Sun announced that it will open source Java ME with the rest of the Java platform!
Now, the big question is which hardware / OS platforms will those open source Java ME implementation run on. In theory, they could release an implementation that only runs in a software emulator on desktop Windows or Linux OSes — pretty much like what Sun did with Java ME CDC reference implementation before. IMO, that was part of the reason why CDC failed to take hold in the PDA market. Without a variety of real devices to run those open source Java ME implementations, they would be utterly useless for most users and developers. I hope the Motorola implementation will run on the new Motorola Linux-based smartphones, and the Sun implementation will run on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices!
The next question is whether Motorola / Sun will provide implementations for important Java ME optional packages. As we all know, MIDP by itself is not very useful. The open source implementation needs at least the MMAPI and the PIM API to be useful. The Bluetooth API, the Mobile 3D API, the Web Services API, and even the Location API are also much needed. It would be ideal if the open source implementation is structured so that the user can decide what optional APIs to install on his/her own Linux/Windows Smartphone.
Well, we can hope …
