The Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days

This week I had the privilege to go to the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara near San Francisco. It was a most pleasing experience and taken into account that this was the first instalment (and hopefully not the last), it all went surprisingly well. Now, mind you, this is no JavaOne, I think there was between 150 and 200 people at the conference over the two days it was scheduled for, so it is at the smaller end of the scale. However, size doesn't always matter and when you come to conferences smaller is sometimes better because you can go more in depth with specialized topics. This was not necessarily true for this one though and in my opinion it may not have gone so much in depth as it could have. A disclaimer before moving on, I am not in any way an experienced embedded systems specialist and have very limited experience with Java in that field. I've done some C and assembly coding in that area, but no Java development. Yet that did not matter much at this conference even though it taunted to be aimed at intermediate to experienced developers, which left me wonder a little bit. Okay, so let's dive into what happened.

As is customary to a lot of Sun sponsored conferences, James Gosling gave the keynote of the conference. Nothing revolutionary in his talk (There was even the usual: Stop using emacs, damnit!), the mobile platform is the desktop of tomorrow and we'll end up having several billions of devices, so let's put the ease of development that Java offers in there. As a guy having coded C on embedded systems (or any other system), I certainly will not disagree with him on this point. The performance of Java has at this point surpassed C and C++ in a lot of performance benchmarks, so this should be a non issue at this point. However, still remains the large footprint of a JVM in terms of memory and power consumption, but more on that later. Announced was the open sourcing of Project Squawk which is a Java based implementation of the JVM (chicken and the egg problem, anyone?), but besides from that it was your average opening keynote. I wasn't able to find the slides online anywhere, maybe they died with James's laptop (At least I would expect this ones not going to have a long lifetime with the amount of complaining from James), but you can find all the other slides here. After that it was on to the technical sessions.

Since this was a fairly conference, there never was more than two concurrent sessions at a time, so you would never miss too much of what was going on. The first session was about JavaME security domains. It was an attempt to address the frustrations that developers have with all this damn security that prevents them from doing what they want. Listening at the presentation it reminded me a lot of the trouble with Applets, although there it could almost always be solved by just signing your application jar. With JavaME you can also sign your application, but that guarantees almost nothing since it is left up to the actual phone manufactured and network providers to define the security policies. That means that if your signed application works with one provider (although most likely with a lot of warnings and prompts thrown at the user), you have no guarantee it will work with another provider or even work with future phones of the same provider. This was a recurring theme of the conference, the providers (and the manufacturers to a certain degree) have made it pretty much impossible to easily port your application from one provider to the other by putting a lot of customized settings to their platforms. Frustrating...

Next up was a presentation of NFC (Near Field Communication) which is basically a short range communication protocol (like 4 cm). The idea is that you just bring your device up to a another NFC device and they can interact to say: Transfer business cards or process payment at the store. The idea is that, since it is such a short range, it is more secure (yeah, I already see myself curled in the corner of the metro to avoid virtual mugging through close contact). It introduces JSR 257, which introduces what I would call a very standard API with listeners, factories and extensibility through interfaces. Looks easy enough to use and potentially has a ton of possible applications, so now all we need is for some actual devices to go out there and use it.

On came Sun and their Sun SPOT team, and that is when the little geek in me got its biggest "Wow! This is cool!" moment of the conference. A Sun SPOT is a small device that is equipped with an ARM processor, temperature and light sensor, accelerometer, wireless, LEDs and a bunch of I/O ports. So what can you use that for? Well everything you want, it is basically a prototyping platform for all kinds of embedded systems. It is easy to use and you will not have all the usual hardware problems to deal with when first trying out your idea. It is fairly cheap (550$ for 3 SPOTs and a base station) and comes with a fairly impressive Netbeans integration. It is pretty much a geeks dream when it comes to toys :-) Yet, I can definitely see the commercial potential of providing hardware for companies to do quick prototyping of new products. At the conference, there was a demonstration of how these had been used to create a bunch of cheap robots to study swarm behavior. Very cool!

The rest of the first day's technical sessions was less interesting, it basically boiled down to a Netbeans tutorial (after all it is a Sun conference). Granted Netbeans is getting better and better, and version 6 definitely makes it cross line between annoying and usable, but come on, this is something that you can go read a tutorial to figure out and while one session about it is okay, let it go, we'll go check it out, stop trying to push down our throats.

To conclude the first day, and before going to Maria Elena's Mexican restaurant for a sociable evening, a panel discussion with representatives from phone manufacturers, network providers and a few software people. The moderators had a script running about what a developer needs to do to get to the mobile market with some new software. This was all very depressing, because what the panel was saying is that you basically need to bow to the network providers. They really don't want you on their phone without them making money out of it. They want to be the physical distributor and the content controller, a little bit like the music industry. Basically you buy a phone but you can't just do what you want with it. They were interrupted mid way by a rebellious voice from the audience, wanting to direct the conversation towards "Why bother making software for mobile phones?". In my opinion, the core of the problem even though the manufacturers have an incentive to get creative software on their phones, the network provider have killed creativity by closing the platform completely to external sources (at least in the US. Asia and Europe seem to have moved beyond that and at this point have a lot more mobile applications than the US). So sad, but I cannot help to wonder what the iPhone will do to this business model after the release of the SDK next month. One can hope that it will force operators to open up to third party applications.

After a good nights sleep, it was time for the second day of the conference. Sadly, it was only 2/3 of a day for me, because I had to leave early to beat the snow storm and get back to Los Angeles. So most of what I saw was dedicated to JavaFX Mobile and PhoneME. JavaFX mobile is not just a mobile implementation of JavaFX the scripting language, it is a complete operating system for the phone, much like... well, PhoneME. So why is that we have two platforms competing within Sun? I do not know and that wasn't really properly addressed. We already have a segmented platform on the mobile market, so why add even more? The talks were somewhat interesting, but it was hard to get exited by yet another phone operating system.

Lastly there was a presentation of Project Squawk. This was by far the most interesting presentation for me, the goal of the project is to rewrite as much as possible of the JVM to java code to make it easier to port to other platforms, embedded platforms among others. Another advantage is that it is a lot easier to cut parts of the JVM and only have what you need to run your application on the given platform. Sort of a customized JVM. Really interesting and since it is now open source everybody can go check out some JVM code without being a C expert. Really cool.

So what is the conclusion for this conference? If I had to sum it up in as few words as possible it would be: Embedded: Cool! Mobile: Sad. The complete clustering and lock down of the mobile platform makes it really unattractive for developers, which is really sad, since there is a lot of cool ideas to explore. So for now, I would stick with embedded if I had to go smaller.