Analyst firm Ovum estimates that there will be over one billion wireless client devices by 2007, providing a new and important channel for goods and services. Many of these devices are likely to use Java, and last week Nokia said it will put Java into 100 million mobile phones by the end of 2003.
As well as new types of mobile phone and a wide range of PDAs, new-generation clients will include developments from today's PCs, set-top boxes and TVs.
For many firms, content delivery to such clients will become increasingly important. Mobile devices, especially when coupled to wireless communications capabilities, are widely expected to be the primary clients for business users. And when it comes to wireless PDAs and similar devices, the signs are that the operating environment of choice is likely to be based on Java.
Operating environments
A recent survey of application developers in the US by research firm Evans Data found that Java is the most popular operating environment for wireless applications. Some 30 percent of developers are using it, according to the study, with only 25 percent using Palm OS, and 22 percent using Microsoft's Windows CE.
Now PC sales are starting to slow, much of the attention of hardware vendors is moving to PDAs and wireless-based systems. For example, SK Telecom of Korea and Hewlett-Packard are jointly developing wireless technology and have each contributed US$5m investment to the project.
Of course, it is not certain that Java will be the most important tool for firms in integrating wireless communications and PDAs, but given its growing support it is increasingly likely.
Oracle is one of the major companies now paying more attention to the use of Java to support mobile applications. Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, speaking at the recent JavaOne conference in San Francisco, promoted Oracle's upcoming 9i Application Server to support Web services and Java development.
He said that the use of open standards would allow users to easily switch from one supplier to another. He argued that 9i would offer superior performance to alternatives such as BEA's WebLogic.
He suggested that Oracle 9i would be able to handle more transactions per second than rivals, such as IBM's WebSphere, although this claim has not yet been verified by independent tests.
Ellison noted that Java is still evolving. 'The Java you use today is not necessarily the Java you used yesterday, and that's the benefit of open source. That's why you picked Java over [Microsoft's] dot-Net [Web services platform],' he said.
Microsoft itself is highly unlikely to support Java. Earlier this year, it launched Jump, the Java Users Migration Path, to its own dot-Net environment. It provides a way for programmers to transfer projects created with Microsoft's obsolete Visual J++ Java tool to the dot-Net environment. Analysts such as The Butler Group, however, said few developers will make such a move.
Web services
Microsoft's push into Web services is not helped by the relative weaknesses of Windows 2000 Server at the high end compared with operating systems such as Unix. For example, analyst firm the Giga Group recently said that Windows 2000 requires three times more reboots than some Unix systems. Recently, a forgotten Novell NetWare server at the University of North Carolina was found still working after being unattended for some four years. Could the same be said for a Windows 2000 server in years to come?
As Ellison sees it, the main threat to Java is not posed by Microsoft and dot-Net, but by misconceptions and doubts that persist about its performance.
For example, an Internet-based petition has recently called on Sun to cut back on Java 'bloatware'. Many of the complaints are against the 40MB size of the Java Virtual Machine, yet this is smaller than Windows DirectX SDK, which is over 100MB. The key figure, perhaps, is the 5MB size of the latest Java Runtime Environment, version 1.4. As this is shared by all Java applications it only needs to be downloaded once, regardless of how many Java applications are being used. Indeed, it could easily be embedded in future PDAs and other wireless clients, which would then make Java applications extremely fast.
