Hudson’s Rather Random Homepage

Cumulation of more reading around, J9/Webspehere more or less is competing product for suns Java ME. Same game, different people. Fun stuff. I even found other java VM’s floating around that also run on Samsungs blackjack, maybe not WELL, but they run.

So I threw IBM’s J9 onto the phone and played around with it, I didn’t make it myself, it was some pre-made file floating around from the old ‘googlemaps java doesn’t work on cingular’s broke ass java’ issue. It works, and it works pretty well too. The permission browser is fully fledged and lets you control what program can do how and when, like it should.

The only gripe is the midlet installer, its configured wrong, you hit a jad or jar file, and it asks for a URL, even when the file is local on the device. J9 wasn’t really adjusted fully for the blackjack/WM5 apparently. You can install things on it, but you need to basically type in raw file paths instead of it figuring them out for you. annoyance, but not bad for a prof of concept seeing as how /everything else/ seems to work out of the box. I uninstaller it after a while, and the original java system took right back over again, no questions asked.
So now a crash course in java on mobile devices.

1. Java VM’s on windows mobile are not really java, its an emulator VM.
2. Aside from some adjustments, all of them are more or less the same.
3. Talking to the hardware of the device is all standardized, Btooth and USB and such are all basically standards-compliant additions to the VM emulator added at compile time so the VM can talk to the phone and vice versa. This is a good thing, if you want your VM to have bluetooth support, you add the java bluetooth to your build environment and thats pretty much it.
4. All the source and tools to build these things are freely available online. All of them, including documentation from AT&T, Samsung, Sun, etc.
5. It’s completely legal to do this, the java VM isn’t standard on windows mobile, its an addition, it’s really just its own WM5 standalone application.
6. All this is worked out by what can basically be called a standards compliance board consisting of all the big names, samsung, nokia, IBM, AT&T, etc etc, as each piece from sun is worked on, they stamp it with tested approval before it becomes part of the universal system, once its been shown to comply, work and do what it needs.

So this really begs the question, why the hell hasn’t anybody done a custom built java VM for all these devices to have a fully fledged VM emulator so people can enjoy a little freedom? it’s entirely possible to do, its legal, and hell, it’s low risk, the chances of you bricking your unit is slim to zero.

You can probably guess what I’m plotting at this point.. :)
To make things even more interesting, there is also an open source version of the J2ME system that is just now starting up. I understand that cellphone providers should try to provide a secure platform for their users. But there is such a thing as too-secure, so secure a feature of a device becomes more or less un-usable. I’m not going to write up a personal application for myself, and pay hundreds of dollars or hoops to get it certed by cingular just so it runs on a phone i damn well own already.

So, I’m off on the direction of replacing the J2ME emulator, build my own, install it on my blackjack, and get back the ability to select my own security instead of somebody else deciding for me. :P

“This is going to get interesting.”

The main links of interest are The AT&T developer site, which requires a free subscription top get to the real meat and taters of it, but has some very interesting things on it, and the navigation-challenged sun java site, specifically, the one pertaining to the J2ME side of things. There is also of course the Sun java open source line of things, but i’m not sure how fledged and stable it may be compared to the main branch. And of course the samsung developer pages located here. Nevermind that last one, its a useless pile of crap.
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