Repairing a fracture

Last week I attended the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara. I'd gone because I produce their community podcasts (http://mobileandmebedded.org). I like the people but was unprepared for how interesting the content was.

There was a recurring theme of fragmentation. Even though there are standards, the standards are implemented differently on each handset and enforced differently by each carrier. A small developer has to test their application on a ton of handsets. We heard presenters use numbers between seven hundred and one thousand different handsets.

One developer brought it home when he said that you go ahead and create an application that works great on a particular handset only to find out that that feature has been turned off by one of the carriers. In other words, the same application, running on the same device, may behave differently depending on who you get your mobile service from.

Java developers confronted this on the desktop. In the early days of Java you would have to write for the least common denominator. What are the features you could ensure were present on all operating systems. Later, the Java WORA was parodied as "Write Once, Debug Anywhere." Despite the cross-platform appeal of Java, many shops are using Java the language and libraries to write Windows only applications. Even so, the fragmentation on mobile devices makes the desktop look like one unified happy family.

Is Google's Android the answer? It's too early to tell, but the comments of these developers makes me believe it won't be. Android can not just solve some of the technical problems it must address the inconsistencies with which the channel and the manufacturers implement whatever spec is agreed upon.

One developer took the microphone during the closing fishbowl to say "what we need is a dictator." He didn't think there was time to let the open source process take its course. This was illustrated when one speaker suggested the need for an API that covered every possible button you could have on the phone and another developer responded that soon there would be no buttons on phones.

These are smart, caring, hard-working, experienced developers. There at last weeks Java ME Developer Days was a gathering of some really creative developers who are doing some very interesting things. When I wear my Java hat I think "how will they get these apps onto phones."

When I wear my Mac hat I think "what an opportunity for Apple." If Apple releases a solid SDK and has a reasonable path for allowing developers to get on the iPhone then they can attract existing developers from other platforms. Apple may not want Java on their iPhone, but they should welcome existing Java developers who have thought about mobile applications for a while. These developers should be ready to code in Obj-C or whatever language the iPhone apps will be written in.

I know that Apple has taken a lot of heat for choosing a single carrier in the US - but after listening to the Java mobile developers, that might be a benefit to developers. Of course there are two big ifs still hanging out there: if the SDK gives us enough power and if there is a reasonable way for us to get our apps on the phones.