By Nathan Eddy
New Zealand-based mobile applications optimization company Innaworks launched a fully automated Java ME to BREW porting solution, alcheMo, which company CEO Stephen Cheng says he hopes will reduce development costs and time associated with porting from Java to BREW.
To ensure the fullest market penetration for their products, mobile content and application publishers--particularly mobile game publishers--want to publish content on both the Java and BREW platform. Because each platform occupies about half of the market for mobile applications in the US, alcheMo offers a solution to the “write once, run everywhere†challenge. “Since the quality of code really matters, many application developers operate two parallel teams for J2ME and BREW rather than relying on outsourced porting,†Cheng says. “In this environment, a single code base is immensely beneficial, as it allows the company to double the productivity while increasing product quality significantly.â€
This solution is particularly well-suited to the mobile game market, Cheng says, because of that industry’s emphasis on scale, speed-to-market and cost. He claims Innaworks’ alcheMo solution reduces time-to-market by four to six weeks. Tier 1 mobile game publishers like Superscape and I-play have already used alcheMo to port some of their titles to Verizon’s and Alltel’s decks. “alcheMo really does deliver on its promises,†says Michael Ewins, I-play’s development director. “Our alcheMo products have been most successful [and] delivered rapidly.â€
The alcheMo solution also reduces quality assurance costs because a functional test can be performed once to cover both platforms. Unlike competing solutions, Cheng claims alcheMo requires absolutely no tweaking of generated code. “With a fully automated tool like alcheMo the programmer doesn’t even need to know about BREW or C++,†he says. “Our customers do not need to learn and program against a vendor specific proprietary API, which can result in a vendor-lock-in situation.â€