Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Monday, September 11, 2006
Is there room for Java ME CDC?
Within Java ME there are so far defined two configurations: CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) and CDC (just remove Limited). These are two very different beasts, where CLDC with the MID Profile is quite compliant with Java SE on a language level, but not on a class library level, while CDC with the Personal Profile (PP) is much more close to Java SE (yet excluding Swing and some other more advanced features), and also requires more CPU power, memory and display real estate.
I mention CDC and PP together, as I believe all mobile phones with CDC need to support at least PP to be useful for mobile application development.
Based on my very brief investigation CDC is currently only available on mobile phones that also have an underlying PDA/smartphone OS, except the platform and reference phone provided by SavaJe. I believe this will continue, at least through 2007. Therefor I'm wondering if CDC will be used much, as performance and functionality are way higher when programming directly for the smartphone OS.
For CLDC/MIDP it's a completely different story, as in mass market mobile phones this is typically the only after-market application platform available, so there's simply no other choice for developers. You obviously have to use what's available.
Also, all phones with CDC also need to support CLDC/MIDP, to provide backwards compatibility with the tons of games and applications available for CLDC/MIDP for years to come.
The way CDC can be "saved" is by being deployed on phones with proprietary OS's or e.g. on Linux phones that don't allow after-market applications any other way, yet MIDP 3 is also on the way, so CDC might be squeezed between phones that don't need it (as they run Symbian OS etc) and phones that rather would use MIDP 3.
I acquired a Sony Ericsson M600i recently for evaluating CDC/PP (and because it was a generally nice phone), and so far I haven't been able to make NetBeans understand that I've installed an SDK for CDC. Many others have had this problem, but I hope I can have it running in a few days.
I don't think I will develop that much for CDC in the short term, nor for Symbian OS / UIQ that the M600i also supports. I will mainly evaluate what's out there so that I can plan ahead.
I see a potentially big corporate and consulting market for CDC applications, as there are a lot of developers for Java SE and Java EE, and they should have easy to move to CDC/PP. Much easier than to learn to use e.g. Symbian OS. Not that there seems to be a lack of Symbian OS developers, but I doubt many IT departments have that competence.
This will be followed up in due time, as I learn more about CDC.
I mention CDC and PP together, as I believe all mobile phones with CDC need to support at least PP to be useful for mobile application development.
Based on my very brief investigation CDC is currently only available on mobile phones that also have an underlying PDA/smartphone OS, except the platform and reference phone provided by SavaJe. I believe this will continue, at least through 2007. Therefor I'm wondering if CDC will be used much, as performance and functionality are way higher when programming directly for the smartphone OS.
For CLDC/MIDP it's a completely different story, as in mass market mobile phones this is typically the only after-market application platform available, so there's simply no other choice for developers. You obviously have to use what's available.
Also, all phones with CDC also need to support CLDC/MIDP, to provide backwards compatibility with the tons of games and applications available for CLDC/MIDP for years to come.
The way CDC can be "saved" is by being deployed on phones with proprietary OS's or e.g. on Linux phones that don't allow after-market applications any other way, yet MIDP 3 is also on the way, so CDC might be squeezed between phones that don't need it (as they run Symbian OS etc) and phones that rather would use MIDP 3.
I acquired a Sony Ericsson M600i recently for evaluating CDC/PP (and because it was a generally nice phone), and so far I haven't been able to make NetBeans understand that I've installed an SDK for CDC. Many others have had this problem, but I hope I can have it running in a few days.
I don't think I will develop that much for CDC in the short term, nor for Symbian OS / UIQ that the M600i also supports. I will mainly evaluate what's out there so that I can plan ahead.
I see a potentially big corporate and consulting market for CDC applications, as there are a lot of developers for Java SE and Java EE, and they should have easy to move to CDC/PP. Much easier than to learn to use e.g. Symbian OS. Not that there seems to be a lack of Symbian OS developers, but I doubt many IT departments have that competence.
This will be followed up in due time, as I learn more about CDC.
