As co-spec lead James Strachan reported in his blog, JSR 241, “The Groovy Programming Language” has been approved for JCP development. And with a unanimous vote!
What’s Groovy, you might ask? Get the answers from:
Interested in joining the expert group? Click here to apply, but don’t worry, even if you aren’t in the EG, James has promised a public mailing list RSN.
My take: With this JSR, Groovy joins PHP on the list of non-Java languages for which Java Platform interfaces/implementations are being officially sorted out. And of course, the unofficial list is much, much longer still. The more choice developers have, the better in my opinion. I can’t wait to read the spec and try out the RI once it’s available!
Following today’s accidental baseball theme: Reuters reports that the San Francisco Giants are WiFi enabling SBC Park. Now I’ll never have a reason to leave! 
Under the “way cool” category: Major League Baseball has extended Sun’s contract for MLB.com.
MLB.com is one heavy hitting site. 2003 stats from the press release:
- 35 million page views on opening day of 2003 playoff series
- MLB.com and the 30 individual team sites registered over 4 billion page views in 2003
- Over 650 million visits during 2003
And there’s a bonus note buried down near the bottom of the release:
In celebration of the 2004 season, Sun is offering free “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” ring tones for mobile phones beginning April 5. For more information on the limited offer, visit java.com/mlb.
Russell Beattie blogged on “Rampaging Computer Science” today. As a part of his post, he mentioned my use of WordPress on BillDay.com.
I did my best to respond in the comments to his blog, in which I wrote:
Though I love Java and have been working with it professionally for 8+ years now, I try not to be too overtly religious when it comes to languages and tools. Freeman Dyson is quoted as saying “A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible” and that’s pretty much my philosophy, too.
I try to use an appropriate tool for the job at hand, whether it’s Java, PHP, Perl, C, Fortran, whatever. (OK, so it’s thankfully been a loooong time for me since Fortran was an “appropriate tool for the job at hand”, but back in my aerospace and geophysics days…
There are certainly great blogging packages for Java (and Perl, and Python, etc.). Given my needs, WordPress was an appropriate tool.
What do you think? Am I committing a sacrilege by using WP instead of SnipSnap, Roller, or some other Java based blogging package? Click on Comments to share your thoughts.
Using WordPress to run manage your own blog? If so, you definitely need to bookmark the WordPress Wiki (table of contents).
You may also want to read the ongoing dev blog (click for RSS feed), support forums, and hacks page (currently points to the Plugins and Hacks forum).
Forbes.com has a Reuters article on “Global camera phone sales in 2003” that’s worth a look.
The obvious stats are the five fold increase in sales in 2003 versus 2002 and the predicted tripling in 2004 versus 2003.
More interestingly, notice how the various vendors stack up in camera phone sales. NEC and Matsushita are far higher in the camera phone rankings than their overall mobile phone market share positions because of the larger penetration of cellcams into their home market of Japan. Meanwhile, Motorola and Siemens both languished with far fewer camera phone sales than you might expect from their overall market penetration. Some of Motorola’s problems may be because of widely reported component shortfalls and manufacturing issues, but one also has to wonder if they and Siemens have simply been slow bringing camera enabled models to market.
My prediction for 2004: Those with the best cellcams win!
Froogle is one of my favorite Google services. Now its svelte younger sibling, Wireless Froogle, has escaped from the labs and is available on your mobile.
Ask questions and learn more about it from the Froogle Wireless forum. Ready to give it a try? Access the service from your phone’s browser via: http://wml.froogle.com/
Comparison shop like there’s no tomorrow!
A solid overview of the latest in mobile games, music, movies, and more: Forbes.com’s: “New Cell Phones Multitask To The Max“.
I find articles like these especially useful to explain just what it is I do to non-techie family members. 
Continuing my ongoing saga of learning more about PHP: Research turned up an interesting article on “Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP“.
Over-the-Air (OTA) installation of MIDlets to PalmOS devices now automagically translates the bits to Palm’s PRC format.
Read all about it in my java.net blog.
I’ve posted the slides for my “Migrating Wireless Applications to MIDP 2.0, WMA, and MMA” webcast presentation. Click here to access the slides (PDF).
Abstract:
This presentation provides a technical overview of recent updates to the J2ME Platform including MIDP 2.0, MMA, and WMA. Attendees will learn how to use the J2ME Wireless Toolkit and Sun Java Studio to take advantage of next generation J2ME features including MIDlet signing, testing MIDlet deployment Over The Air (OTA), MIDlets sending and receiving SMS messages, MIDlets with multimedia functionality, etc.
Please use the Comments link at the bottom right of this blog entry to discuss the presentation, ask questions, or make suggestions on improving the presentation.
And the new handsets should keep on coming: “Nokia Plans 40 New Handsets in 2004, Same as 2003“. Read more from Nokia’s press release and watch Nokia’s press site for the full text of CEO Jorma Ollila’s speech from which this was excerpted.
Both Motorola and Nokia have announced some interesting new devices at CTIA this week.
A small sample from the cellcam category alone:
- Motorola A845 (fact sheet), a 3G/UMTS phone with video and still camera support, Bluetooth, an MP3 player, and 64MB of memory built-in, to be deployed by AT&T Wireless in H2 2004.
- Nokia 6255 (Forum Nokia data sheet), a CDMA2000 1X clamshell handset with dual color screens, a VGA camera with flash (imagine that, a flash!), MP3/AAC and stereo FM radio support, GPS support for E911, Bluetooth, and J2ME MIDP 2.0. All in all, Nokia’s most advanced and feature rich CDMA handset, available Q4 2004.
Is the US finally starting to catch up with the rest of the wireless world’s handset options?
Also, Nokia made some Series 60 news including the reiteration of the availability of Series60.com, a one stop shop for Series 60 device and development information from all licensees, and the announcement that LG Electronics has licensed Series 60 for use in upcoming LG Symbian based smart phones.
XML.com article on “Googling for XML” (and applications thereof including RSS, RDF, FOAF, etc.).
Reuters provides a glimpse of things to be discussed at this year’s CTIA Wireless in “Mobile Industry Focuses on Fixing Basics“.
Nokia announced its first megapixel cellcam this week as part of its CeBIT 2004 announcements. The Nokia 7610 ups the photo resolution to approximately 1Mpix but still falls short on my cellcam wishlist for 2004 (no flash, doesn’t support EDGE or WiFi, size is apparently smaller than the 3650 but not clear from any info I can find at this point).
Everybody’s been blogging about the 7610’s feature set, so rather than repeat what they’ve been saying, I’ll link to them. Read all about it from:
Will this be “the” device of 2004 instead of the 6620, or are we still waiting for it to appear? I’m inclined to think the latter. There are simply too many things missing:
- “In flight”, aka “hospital” mode, allowing one to use the non-cell features of the phone (calendar and address book, J2ME applications, camera, etc.) while having wireless capability turned off
- Camera flash (OK, I’ve harped on this before, but other cellcams vendors have had them for months)
- EDGE and WiFi support (GPRS is just too darned slow)
- Serviceable desktop software (assuming PC Suite for 7610 has not been vastly improved from the 3650 version: Why can’t we enter phone numbers and other address and calendar information in PC Suite like we can in the Palm Desktop?)
- From the “I wish someone would do this” category: FRS/GMRS and GPS, which would render any Mpix cellcam so equipped a “must have” gadget for outdoor enthusiasts of many persuasions
