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Comments on “Mobility is more than J2ME (and the job martket for 2004)”, pt I

Michael Yuan had a pretty inflammatory post recently. Here are the first wave of my comments on this interesting topic.

“1. The move to mobility is inevitable in the enterprise. The IT revolution has to reach hundreds of millions of mobile workers in order to realize its promise. There is no other way. However, the real question is how and when this will happen. With the IT over-investment in the last decade, this might take several more years.”

Agreed. Allowing mobile users to access the corporate datacenter is an inevitability. When it does happen, however, it certainly won’t have the sexiness or big bang of the internet revolution. In fact, it’s much more an evolution than a revolution. Folks already have access to corporate databases right now; the mobile revolution simply combines the portability of paper with the real time nature of laptops. However, letting knowledge workers such as sales people and truckers have real time information on such a cheap, reliable device really will change the nature of the business. But we won’t see sock rabbits or dot.com millions, since such changes will favor existing businesses.

“2. When enterprises move to mobility, a key consideration is to preserve existing investment. Fancy flashy J2ME games will not do it. The task is often to develop specialized gateway servers and J2ME integration software to incorporate smart mobile frontends into the system. That requires the developers to have deep understanding of both J2EE and J2ME. I think that the “end-to-end” sector is where the real opportunities are in the next several years. That is also what “Enterprise J2ME” is all about. :)”

Now, don’t be so quick to judge. Gamers pushed the boundaries of the PC in terms of computing power, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happen on the MIDP platform. That said, I’m not a gamer. However, I still have issues with the idea of folks paying to play a game on a cell phone. I play snake, but that’s a simple, free game, and I’m certainly not dedicated to it. Fred Grott claims that MMORPGs are going to drive J2ME game development–I just don’t see folks doing that when you can get a much, much richer experience from the XBox or Game Cube or PC sitting at home.

And I don’t see why Michael ties J2ME and J2EE so tightly. The whole point of web services is to decouple the server and the client. I dont’ see any reason why you couldn’t have J2ME talk to a .NET server, or a BREW client talk to a J2EE server. To me, the larger issue with the mobile revolution is the architecture of the J2ME applications, since I think that such small, non networked, memory constrained applications (with either extremely limited portability or extremely limited user interfaces, take your pick) are going to be a world apart from the standard java developer’s experience (which is HTML generation, not swing).

I’m going to leave his third point for another post, as the outsourcing issue is…worthy of a separate discussion.

One thought on “Comments on “Mobility is more than J2ME (and the job martket for 2004)”, pt I

  1. Michael Yuan says:

    Hi Dan,

    Thank you for your comments. So far, I do not see any major difference between us. 🙂 Anyway, I blogged a response here:

    http://juntao.blog-city.com/read/412073.htm

    I guess the real problem must be on the outsourcing issue! I look forward to your part II comments. 😉

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