Hi all,
I'm Tomer Cohen from Israel. I'm one of those who are waiting to have a format
Java solution (VM) for the PDA world. I actually think there must be a distinction between 2 kinds of PDA available 2day. The first is the PalmOS based pdas (but not the new Sony CLIE which runs sony's propriatry multimedia solutions and much more), which are mainly an advance PIM deivce OS, and the Symbian v6.0/PocketPC (soon to be Talisker - WinCE 4.0) which are actually a small handheld PC.
What I know about the PDAP is that:
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According to Michal Geva from Sun Israel, It is supposed to be released sometime at the end of 2001. She recently said that it is in some stage of specification and it should contain most of the capabilities of the JDK 1.1.*. She also said that the PDAP is going to use the CLDC configuration, which, as far as I understand, is quite limited for a real multimedia/PC like mobile device.
I participated in the J2ME conference held on last March in London. One of the lectures there was from quite a serious guy from Symbian who said that, due to too many participants in the PDAP specification forum, it is too hard or might be even impossible to finish this profile. Thus, he assumed, that the PersonalJava might be finally the main guidance of this profile since it is already accepted by some companies. However, this approach doesn't feat with the core J2ME platform since that PJava is almost exactly as the JDK 1.1.8 including the class validation approach that was improved in runtime CPU and memory consumption which result in lower CPU, memory and battery constraints on the PDA devices. Additionally, he said that there is no point in trying to use the MIDP as a "basic" java profile for the PDA since it utilizes less than 10% of his new Symbian v6.0 OS's capabilities.
Finally, In my point of view, the PDAP should have the advantages of pre-verifying mechanism found in the CLDC but it should use the CDC instead in order to be able to utilize the most of the amazing new PocketPC/Symbian PDAs. Additionally, the PDAP should inherit the following approaches/APIs from the J2SE specifications:
1. The security model - in order to enable the development of real application for these devices.
2. Swing - for real GUI !!
3. RMI --> JINI (very nice to have but not a must)
What I'd be happy to have on this
thread is that people would discuss:
1. Their thoughts about the way it would be the best approach to "attack" this diversed world of devices and applications that are to be used upon them.
2. The most updated new about development tools for this profile
3. The most important issues relevant to this profile
4. Any thing else you guys have on your mind that might be interesting/good to know.
Thank you in advance,
Tomer Cohen
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