iTechNote

How successful is mobile Java? Everybody will have to agree that you hardly see any mobile Java applications. You will see far more Symbian applications than mobile Java application. This is in contrary to Nokia, the largest player who has outshipped the entire PC industry by a factor of close to three, delivering 153 million mobile phones to consumers in the first half of this year. What went wrong?

According to Nokia, “What happened is that in the early days of J2ME we had MIDP and a bunch of different APIs, but nobody defined a framework that every handset should support. A lot of handsets offered MIDP support, but what additional APIs were supported varied between different operators and different handset manufacturers.” This is no surprise in an industry where APIs go through cycles of consolidation from day one they are published. The solution is naturally another consolidation, this time under the name of Mobile Service Architecture, or MSA.

MSA is the umbrella JSR that will define the JSRs all MSA-compliant handsets must support, similarly to how JTWI defined the APIs to be supported (MMAPI 1.0, WMA 1.1, MIDP 2.0, etc.) by all JTWI-compliant handsets (note that the current generation of MIDP handsets are JTWI-compliant). MSA is the “next generation” JTWI if you will, and it will define many JSRs, including MIDP 2.1, as part of its definition. Just before you get confused, JTWI or Java Technology for Wireless Industry is another attempt of consolidation.

Nokia’s plan is to move from CLDC to CDC together with MSA on a more powerful and capable environment. The ultimate goal of Nokia in supporting MSA is “to come up with an API that’s good for developers, good for the operators, and good for the service providers”.

Yes, the state of the art Nokia N95 is not yet MSA-compliant. It is only JTWI-compliant together with other NSeries models.

via The Future of Mobile Java