JavaOne, Day 2: Bluetooth BOF report

I’m catching up on a number of JavaOne 2004 related entries, apologies for the delay (the conference always seems to have a way of eating up every instant of possible blogging time, then right after JavaOne was over I had a long 4th of July holiday weekend with my family and am just now getting back in the swing of things). Anyway, on to my day 2 report…

In addition to delivering my “J2ME at Five” BOF and discussing J2ME and wireless development with attendees at Nokia’s booth and around the show, I managed to attend a very interesting talk on developing multiplayer games using the Java APIs for Bluetooth (JSR 82) the night of day 2.

Carlos Quiroz and David Price of Nokia Research Center (disclaimer: yes, these guys have bought me a beer before) spoke on “Implementing Multiplayer MIDP 2.0 Games Using Bluetooth“. They provided a nice overview of BT radio tech and the BT Java API, then a mini-howto illustrated with an example application run on two Nokia 6600 handsets and one Nokia 6230. One of the 6600’s was acting as the BT master while the other devices were slaves and played the game against one another over the BT link. Carlos provided a number of tips on real world BT implementation issues (test in a “busy” BT environment and expect discovery failures, always use at least three devices to expose potential networking issues, etc.) and David summed things up at the end of the BOF by providing links to a number of useful Java BT development resources including:

• “Bluetooth Application Programming with the Java APIs” by Kumar, Kline, and Thompson
• “Introduction To Developing Networked MIDlets Using Bluetooth (With Example) v1.0” from Forum Nokia’s Bluetooth section
• Series 60 MIDP SDK 2.1 Beta for Symbian OS (runs J2ME including MIDP 2.0 and Bluetooth API in a Series 60 emulator)

Definitely a worthwhile session for anyone interested in J2ME BT networking, and especially for anyone designing multiplayer games or other multiparticipant networked PAN applications.

BTW, if you are interested in BT game development I’d also recommend you check out the resources available from Forum Nokia’s Mobile Games page.