Bay Area Mobility Forum
I’ll be speaking at the Bay Area Mobility Forum’s first meeting on Saturday, August 21st.
I’m going to build on the technical foundation provided by my Nokia Developer Learning Series Advanced MIDP 2.0 webcast earlier in the week to deliver an updated version of my JavaOne BOF “J2ME at Five: Where We’ve Been, and Where We’ll Be at Ten”.
Abstract:
Java technology took the wireless world by storm when the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) was first introduced for mobile devices, starting with the KVM at the JavaOne conference in June 1999.
Much has happened in the last five years. More than 120 million MIDP 1.0 devices are in consumers hands and MIDP 2.0 devices are now shipping in volume. Many interesting wireless Java applications are in daily use. J2ME technology-based wireless games continue to draw eyeballs and twitching thumbs the world over.
This session examines the history and technical merits of J2ME technologies that have allowed it to succeed over the past five years. We should have plenty of time after the presentation for discussion and extended Q&A where we’ll examine what needs to happen (technology, business, and otherwise) for the J2ME platform to be even more successful in its next five years.
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, why not attend both events, webcast and BAMF meeting?
BillDay.com 
Sorry I missed your presentation for BAMF — Your view on J2ME is interesting from a handset perspective but is missing a developer perspective. How many developers are really out there in the world writing J2ME apps? NOT Java apps — there is a big difference between a J2EE developer and a J2ME developer… and where is the development community? Components? Publications? This is where J2ME is failing. Compare to the community developing around Microsoft’s PocketPC and Phone Edition communities — a tradition much more familiar with client side application development. A miniscule number of devices compared to J2ME — and yet an order of magnitude more applications… Handset manufacturers will have to correct this development community deficiency or they will lose to Microsoft in the long run.
I appreciate your comments but must respectfully disagree on a number of your points. Or at the least, qualify some of them.
While I agree that Microsoft sometimes does a better job of publicizing and “talking up” what they do have, that doesn’t mean that other options don’t exist, it simply means we (in this case the Java Community in general and Nokia and me specifically) have even more evangelism work to do.
In fact, Nokia has a large and growing catalog of J2ME applications (the usual suspects such as games but also personal productivity, business and enterprise, vertical industry, and other applications). See my earlier post on my Nokia 7610 for a link to a small sample of some of the latest in the Forum Nokia application catalog.
There is always more to do, though, and I agree that we need to do it aggressively, and now. I would appreciate any specific suggestions or requests you have as I work to do my part for Nokia and the J2ME development community at large.