Blowing the doors to Palm - Java programming for Tungsten handhelds

[asj]

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/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2914374,00.html

--------------------------------------------------------

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.

 

[username]

<just another java rambling by asj deleted>

removed microsoft.public.pocketpc from the crosspostinglist, as this posting
is irrelevant to that newsgroup

 

[Brandon Blackmoor]

Nevertheless I consider this a good news - I
am a Java guy and have been waiting for this

Waiting for the announcement, or waiting for Palm to follow through
with it? Palm has made that same announcement almost word for word at
every JavaOne conference since the late 1990's.

I'm not holding my breath.

 

[William P.N. Smith]

Where would one find info on Java in general and this particular "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." version of it?

Is Java very difficult, compared to C, Perl, etc?

 

[Ananda Sim]

Hi

Thanks for that overview and references. Whilst we wait for J2ME for
PocketPC (I assume there is none), is it worth bothering playing with
alternatives like EWE?

Ananda

 

[dennis m parrott]

If you've programmed a bit in C++, Java isn't any stretch... Some feel that
the object model in Java is a little bit simpler than in C++.

Frankly, Java reminds me of a cross between Pascal or Modula and C with some
object-related sugar sprinkled on liberally.

dennis parrott

 

[Person]

you don't need to....it'll be shipping by fall (unlike before, when
announced shipping dates were nebulous at best).......this time, (1)
it's IBM that made the joint announcement; (2) it's not Palm the
handheld maker that is doing this, but the now-separate entity
PalmSource; (3) PalmSource NEEDS IBM to gain more traction in the
enterprise...you could say, Palm needs IBM (and Java) more than IBM
needs Palm....

SuperWaba!
SuperWaba!
SuperWaba!
A VM for Java.
??? where you can dl. Chck Google.

 

[Andreas Rueckert]

take a look at J2ME...the market for smartphones in the consumer field
is actually several times larger than that of handhelds and climbing
fast (nearly 100 million java-enabled phones since last year)....J2ME
will allow you to write to many smartphones AND now palm tungstens and
other handhelds....

And you can do it with one codebase. I'm from the Java-Chess team
( http://www.java-chess.de ) and it took me less than 2 hrs to run the
J2ME version on POSE (emulating a 2MB(!) Palm M100). Most of this time
was spent adding the pointing device to our control layer. And those M100
are really cheap on eBay, so I might get me one just for fun.
Now if my midp4palm version would support PNG transparency it would look
somewhat better...

Ciao,
Andreas

 

[RaBi]

If you've programmed a bit in C++, Java isn't any stretch... Some feel that
the object model in Java is a little bit simpler than in C++.

ACK

Learning the Java language takes a couple of hours - a couple of days if you
want to know the details like static intializers, bit shifting, inner
classes, ...
Easy.

The hard part is in the APIs. There are so many APIs available that you can
learn Java 24/7 for the next year. And then start all over again because
most APIs have evolved in the meantime. Just think about all the nice
acronyms AWT, Swing, EJB, JDO, RMI, JavaMail, JMS, Servlets, JSP, JDBC, etc,
etc

Learning the Java language is like learning all characters between A and Z:
Very easy but without knowing words, grammatics and all that stuff that's
worth nothing...

I'm not discouraging you from learning Java but be prepared to learn a lot.
I've been working full time in Java for 6 years now and still busy
learning...

#rb

 

[RaBi]

Waiting for the announcement, or waiting for Palm to follow through
with it? Palm has made that same announcement almost word for word at
every JavaOne conference since the late 1990's.

Yes- I still have my good old Palm V bought a that JavaOne when they showed
us Java on it. Must have been '98 or '99.

But this time I think it's different. Big blue is much more reliable than
Sun when announcing that sort of stuff.


#rb

 

[RaBi]

Take a look at this simple application, for instance:

class SimpleApp {
System.out.println("Dude, this is neat!");
}

wow... that's cool. Doesn't even compile!

 

[asj]

wow... that's cool. Doesn't even compile!

LOL. perhaps actually including a main method (which is executed first
when an app is called) would help, as in:

public class SimpleApp {

public static void main (String [] args)
{
System.out.println("hello.");
}

}

 

[username]

there are actually JVMs for windows handhelds, eg.:
http://www.blueboard.com/j2me/notes/2002_7_26.htm

however, there is some concern that sun has decided not to move forward
with anything for the latest windows ce, nor does there seem to be
anyone taking the ball in their stead.

well thats bad news for java. Add to it that within 2 years, 30% of all new
cars come equipped with win ce devices ....

 

[username]

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).

yawn

 

[asj]

well thats bad news for java. Add to it that within 2 years, 30% of all new
cars come equipped with win ce devices ....

not particularly, since there will be probably be MORE cars coming out
using J2ME, which has GM and others behind it.
note that j2me will run on top of wince (or any other os like linux or
palm) if needed, OR it may run by itself as the OS - so by knowing java
you can also program on top of whatever OS is used....it's the best of
any world.

also, wince seems to be stumbling around:

for example, in the handheld market in europe:
"In the European market from Q2 2002 to Q2 2003, Palm and Sony (both
Palm OS) showed significant year-on-year growth of 45 per cent and 64
per cent, respectively. HP's shipments (Windows CE) grew too, by 2%, but
not enough to prevent its market share TUMBLING from 36% to 25%."

in the case of handheld phones, smartcards, and SIM cards for handsets,
it's not even close, with J2ME crushing wince in terms of deployment and
commercial success (not vaporware).
http://www.blueboard.com/j2me/why.htm

 

[Brandon Blackmoor]

well thats bad news for java.

WinCE is crap. Why bother supporting it?

Add to it that within 2 years, 30% of all new
cars come equipped with win ce devices ....

That'll last until auto manufacturers learn what computer manufacturers
already know. People grudgingly accept that their computer crash
periodically. They won't be so patient when their car's expensive
WinCE-based dashboard is as unreliable as their AOL account.

 

[asj]

Palm apps don't have to be complex to be valuable. Canadian doctors
pay for example for a little app that just lists the prices of various
medications in US dollars. It does not even convert to Canadian for
them automatically much less give them much lower Canadian prices.

very good point (although i'm not sure how it relates to what he just
said)...a lot of people have the mistaken notion that to be successful,
an app has to do everything but wash the kitchen sink, and it has to do
it in color. in fact, there are large numbers of small niches that could
be profitably exploited if researched and marketed correctly.

 

[Guest]

well thats bad news for java. Add to it that within 2 years, 30% of all new
cars come equipped with win ce devices ....

Hmm, adding a crash prone OS to a crash prone transportation
system. Great!

As a point of interest, what handy functions is this expected to
add?

 

[RaBi]

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).

BTW: I just tried IBM's JVM. Doesn't run on my Zire71 but according to spec
it's not supposed to be ready for PalmOS 5. Runs without probs on my Palm V
with OS3.5 but a small HelloWorld takes 14 sec to show up. Still Tungstens
are much faster so we'll see.

#rb

 

[asj]

As for java, I doubt that's a wise choice in situations where microseconds
count. I hope they don't use it for things like ABS braking, suspension
assist or airbag release. Else the car might throw more than a runtime
exception.

believe it or not, real time java is starting to compete (and win)
against ADA and C alternatives in real world situations.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=r...F-8&oe=UTF-8&[email protected]&rnum=2