Editor's Corner: JavaOne 2006 Update

JavaOne was a blast! Thanks to all the readers who said "hi."

The most exciting JavaOne news for mobile developers is the Jasper S20, the first phone to use SavaJe's (pronounced "savage") Java-based OS. The Jasper S20 was named "device of the show" and the Jasper booth quickly sold out of $200 developer models. The SavaJe OS makes it very easy for Java developers to create sophisticated apps that integrate with the OS and provide a consistent user experience. Action Engine teamed up with SavaJe to create a slick new version of Action Engine's Brand-n-Go software for the launch the S20. "Porting" the app to SavaJe reportedly took a matter of days and the app runs noticeably faster on the S20. SavaJe has a brochure (pdf) available for the handset and more information on its Web site.

I also had an opportunity to serve as a judge for Motorola's 2006//CODE:MOTO development contest. Independent programmers were challenged to create a working Java ME game or application in a matter of days. CODE:MOTO highlighted both the difficulties of developing complete Java applications (even when only targeting one brand of handsets) and the impressive talent of some of the skilled Java developers. You can read more about the contest and its winners at MotoDev.

One announcement from the conference that had many people talking was Sun's new open source license for Java. Sun has been resisting calls to open source for years, and this seems like a big win for the OSS community, though there are plenty of critics saying Sun hasn't gone far enough or that it doesn't matter anyway. Can fully open-sourcing the JVM be far off?

Sun isn't the only company reaching out to open source developers. Motorola has launched opensource.motorola.com, a portal for Motorola source code, open source projects and programming information for Motorola devices. The first two big projects are JSR 271, better known as the MIDP3 specs, and Gatling, an open-source Java test framework. -Eli

P.S. Next week I'll be reporting live from QUALCOMM's BREW 2006 conference in San Diego. Send me an email if you think there's something I should check out while I'm there.