Mobile software development evolution

Yesterday was Düsseldorf's yearly Marathon and in good tradition, several runners from Vodafone tackled the full track or the famous relay run.
In 2007 I developed a J2ME application which transferred the current location from each runner to a server, so that the guys at our camp could watch the runners on Google earth.
Thursday evening I decided to implement the same functionality using today's mobile and server platforms (android and Google App Engine).
Long story short: The thing which took 5-6 days of development in 2007 (not inculding several test-runs outside) and which was still very shaky and unstable at the end, was build in 26 hours today.
Why? Mainly becasue server and client development has become so much easier. On the server side a deployment to app engine only takes minutes. In the past I had to set up my Jetty somewhere, re-configure the frontend apache, deploy a new DB to MySQL and create the schema etc...
On the client side android enables quick turn around times and most important: A stable runtime compared to the J2ME implementations which often crashed or looses connections.
The hardware of course is getting better, where in 2007 nearly no phone had GPS, I had to connect to an external one via bluetooth and implement the NMEA protocol, today's GPS location is just an API call away.
The good news: You get way more things done in less time than 4 years ago ;)

The next generation... fragmentation?

A lot of people argue about JME fragmentation. And about JME, Symbian, Windows Mobile development in general. Too complex, too time-consuming, too fragmented. I agreed. And it seems like most of the people are looking for Web-style, Widgets like solutions for this. I support that "hype", but only to a certain extend. No doubt, it's nearly 10 times easier building a User Interface on a capable(!) browser using XHTML, SVG, ECMA script, rather then using the paint(Graphics g) Method in JME. Agreed. But when it comes to questions like: "How do I get the GPS-location in the browser-based application?" it's getting interesting.... Currently everyone wants to introduce his own solution in that space. Gears (from Google), Mozilla, LocationAware, OMTP, W3C, OpenAjax Alliance, just to mention a few examples. That's fragmentation at it's best. When people talk about fragmentation in the JME space, they usually mean that there are different APIs available on different devices and that the APIs behave differently (due to bugs or bad Spec). What is currently happening in the "browser-world" is even worse. They will have the same problems like JME (bugs, availablility of APIs cross devices) PLUS they don't even have consistent APIs yet. I hope that people start recognize this, and feed their proposals into a standardisation body to get a consistent API out as soon as possible...

Motion sensor fun

I played around with the accelerometer in my Sony Ericsson W910i phone which is accessible for JME applications via JSR 256. I took the physic engine from Marcin Ploska and extended it with accelerometer support. See the results here:

JSR 226 Demos

I gave a speech at JAX this year (on the mobility track) regarding JSR 226 and the usage of SVG for the UI of mobile applications. I think that SVG is still a bit underastimated at all. The scalability features of SVG are very useful especially on the various screen sizes on mobile devices.
To show the audience the features of SVG on pratical use cases, I created some demos which I'd like to show you here. Static images can't replace the animations of course, but it should give you an idea what SVG can do for you ;) I should mention that the SVG artwort was created by our graphics team, I'm just doing the java piece :)

Java on iPhone

It looks like some guys really make progress on this.
JamVM is already available as posted here and here.
SUN announced to port it, and it looks like the guys from the phoneME team has taken this challenge and ported phoneME advanced (CDC) to it.
Cool guys, go ahead, the iPhone is definetly the coolest hardware platform you can run on currently!

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

...is out and it has pretty cool new features. My favourite is the graphical text-input of URLs including auto-completion and suggests. Very nice. Also the "save page" function is cool for saving time-shedules of trains or something like that. Good job opera!
Go to
http://mini.opera.com/beta/
for download!

JavaFX Mobile on DevDays

Unfortunately I'm not able to join the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara but I decided to watch the live stream of the session "Developing Applications for JavaFX Mobile" to find out a little bit more about Sun's mobile operating system.
First of all: The live stream worked really good, and there's also a chat attached to the session you're watching where you can ask questions. I took the chance to dig a bit deeper into the Web-side of the story and asked for SVG and Java PlugIn support of the WebKit based browser. Unfortunately Sun is not implementing this in their first release.... too bad. I'm wondering why they are putting so much effort on their new Java Plugin of the update N release if they don't put it into their mobile platform...
Anyway, the whole JavaFX Mobile operating system is clear competitor for android with the huge advantage that Sun is able to run 100% pure Java SE on it.
Check out the slides of that session, it's really worth it.

W910i review

I can name a SE W910i my own for some weeks now and I really like that device. I would like to show some pretty nice features I like most. First, the RSS ticker on the idle screen. Really usefull if you have a data flat fee. You can add the news or flickr (or NoseRub) feeds you like and the phone will display the latest news in a carrousel like ticker on the idle screen like this:
Nice. I really like to make more use of the idle screen, so I used the ability of the W910i to create an idle screen midlet, which you can do on many of the latest SE-Phones (most JP-7 and all JP-8 phones). My first midlet just displayed pictures from my picasa web album on the idle screen like. A bit boring over time. Now I use JSR 184 to map those pictures to a cube and do some nice 3D-transition effects like this:


I also checked out the SenseMe function, but I'm a bit disappointed especially by the horrible Windows application from Sony Ericsson. Not useable at all. The Media Player is pretty nice, it rotates the pictures and videos depending of the orientation of your phone. Cool.
Overall a cool phone with only few negative aspects: No GPS, a bit unstable firmware and a plastic cover. Hopefully the announced W760 will overcome those issues ;)

The android landed...

... and disperse a lot of dust in the mobile world.

My first thoughts, relatively unordered and not well consolidated...

• What a cool SDK!!! Everything you need! Very cool documentation (try the search box), Eclipse PlugIn, working samples, emulator, debugging and logging, everything for free on Window, Linux and Mac. Feel free to compare that with the
  
• WTK for JME (nearly equal)
• Symbian S60 SDK (sucks)
• Windows Mobile (not free, installs tons of crap on your PC, and so on...)
  
• iPhone SDK? (We will see...;) )
• Why have those guys re-invented all the JSRs? The only reason for me is licensing issues. Too bad for the developers.
• A pretty cool concept of handling application life cycle whiting the OS.
• I like the approach of a generic data model on the phone, I also like the idea that there are no "native" apps on the phone. Everything is Java. Looks a bit like the SavaJe idea (do you remember that?) but in cool ;)
• They build in a java - browser bridge! How cool is that?
  

Let's see where Google drive this game. Many open questions.... How will Google avoid fragmentation? What parts will really become open source? And so on and so forth...
We will see... But nevertheless, this will bring again some action to the mobile world, and changes can't be bad ;)

An android comes from outer space...

Google announced andriod today. Together with an impressive list of cooperation partners (check the open handset alliance) Google created an OS for mobile phones based on open standards (as they claim) and will open source it. There are tons of rumors out there and less facts, so it's hard to come to a conclusion right now, but somehow I have the feeling that this will be a very big (and good!) thing...
Mobile developers: Keep your fingers crossed, the SDK is coming! ;)

JavaFX

Here's a good summary of JavaFX and what SUN wants to cover with it. Even that I don't believe that JavaFX Mobile as a full phone stack will be a success, there are good parts of the JavaFX program. For example the Consumer JRE initiative is more then needed now, most interesting part seems to be the Java Kernel idea here.

Mobile Trail Explorer

If you do some kind of outdoor sports like running or hiking and you don't have the money for a garmin forerunner you can use your mobile phone and a GPS reciever via bluetooth to track your trails. The mobile trail explorer as a very good software you can use for this. It exports your trails to KML or GPX which you can import in Sporttracks. That's pretty cool because you have all the data collected in on place.
Check that screenshot:

Java ME GUI APIs

This is a very nice article describing the different GUI APIs available in JME. Gives you an excellent summary about the pro's and con's.

PS 3 HandsOn

This weekend we had the chance to try a Sony Playstation 3 and I'd like to share my view on this device.
We connected the PS3 via HDMI to a 40'' full HD LCD TV and the quality of the game graphics and the blue ray movies was absolute impressive. We played the Gran Tourism concept demo and it's really hard to tell the difference between a real race and this game.
After watching three blue ray movies, you don't want to see any DVD again. And switching back to the good old TV signal makes you feel sick.
I also liked the openness of the platform. You can install yellow dog linux on it and you can plug in nearly every USB device.
We connected the PS3 via wireless LAN, and we got demos, trailers and updates for free. Overall the hole concept feels better then the XBOX360. Unnfortunatly I had no time for checking out some BD-J examples (I've seen cool demos on the JavaOne) but I will try that next time. XBOX360 and HD-DVD: Get lost! ;)

Interview about JavaFX Mobile

Here is an interesting interview with Jacob Lehrbaum about JavaFX Mobile. Besides the disturbing background noices, you can find out that Sun really wants to sell a complete integrated software stack for mobile devices to the handset manufactures. Let's see if there's really the need for another platform on heterogenous mobile market....

Once again JavaOne...

... is over. And once again I picked up many interesting things; things I will have a closer look on, things to tell other people, things to be observed in the future, and hopefully things I will use in real projects. I also met several nice people there and had interesting discussions. Thanks to SUN for this event ;)

JavaOne and "crisp"

I've been in several sessions right now and one really good thing I recognized is that terms like "user experience", "user interface", "rich graphics", "crisp", "shiny" etc. are mentioned quite often. Not only JavaFX but several other developments reflects a new thinking in this "gray" java world. People have understood that a good, compelling user experience is mandatory for a good product. Thanks to the iPhone and other products, java will hopefully loose the old image of heavy-weighted, boring, gray and not compelling user interfaces.

JavaOne and JavaFX

JavaOne is on the second day and JavaFX is still the "big" thing. To correct my previous post, JavaFX is not just the scripting language, but JavaFX script is the correct term. It looks like JavaFX is mainly the so called F3 project. You can already get demos and source code for JSE 6 here: https://openjfx.dev.java.net/
More infos on JavaFX are listed here: http://java.sun.com/javafx/
Additionally to that, there is the Term JavaFX Mobile. It looks like this is a full JavaOS for mobile devices including a JavaFX script runtime. SUN showed some demos on linux based mobiles. Probably this is based on the SavaJe technology, but this is just a guess from my side.
How JavaFX Mobile is fitting to the CDC / CLDC and MIDP roadmap, and how it relates to JSR 226 and SVG is still a mystery for me. If anybody has ideas around this, feel free to comment!

JavaOne KeyNote

Just a short note from the JavaOne: SUN announced JavaFX a script language for java based, "flashy" user interfaces as far as I understood.
But there are 1000 of questions open, especially when it comes to mobile devices... I will recap that later.

JavaOne and Marathon

Next week I will attend JavaOne and I'm really looking forward to this. But right before that I have to finish my part of my relay team on the Düsseldorf Marathon.
You can follow our activities on the marathon on sunday on this page.