Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz is set to announce the open sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days. After months of discussion, it looks like the fears of open-sourcing core Java is finally overcome.
The past discussion about the issues of opening up core Java had always been it opens the doors for competitors to grab and change Java, resulting in the kernel forking and compatibility problems. The biggest benefit it may bring is to keep Java alive with community efforts given that Sun is not adequately promoting Java anymore.
One of the major hurdles of open sourcing Java is the approval of open source license. Sun may not have the rights to open source all the code given that there are codes licensed from third party. As a comparison, it took Sun five years in the case of OpenSolaris project to replace these codes with open source or rewritten codes. The initial components of Open Source Java will likely be the Java compiler and Hotspot.
Sun Certified Business Component Developer (SCBCD) is for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology business component developers who are responsible for designing, developing, testing, deploying and integrating EJB applications. To achieve certifications, candidates must be a Sun Certified Java Programmer, SCJP (any edition) and successfully complete one exam.
The current certification exam covers only Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition 1.3 topics. The new certification exam upgrades the existing topics to include Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.0. Prior to the announcement of the actual exam, free beta exam is open to the early birds to try out.
Unlike other Sun Microsystems certification exams, the beta exam does NOT require a voucher i.e. FREE. The normal exam fee is $200. To register for the beta exam, you may register by phone, by calling your regional Prometric registration office.
The beta exam is open for registration starting November 24, 2006. You can select any day in between December 8, 2006 – January 2, 2007 to sit for the exam.
Jini and Universal Plug & Play are the prominent device coordination frameworks for information appliances. These architectures are essentially coordination frameworks that propose certain ways and means of device interaction with the ultimate aim of simple, seamless and scalable device interoperability.
Device coordination provide a subset of the following capabilities to a device:
- Ability to announce its presence to the network
- Automatic discovery of devices in the neighborhood and even those located remotely
- Ability to describe its capabilities as well as query/understand the capabilities of other devices
- Self configuration without administrative intervention
- Seamless interoperability with other devices wherever meaningful
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.