• Ballmer: Linux Bigger Competitor than Apple;
• Apple released the first beta release of Safari 4.

An Open-Source Java Port To iPhone?

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 10, @12:43PM
from the one-can-hope dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With the first anniversary of open-source Java coming up November 13, a Sun official believes the project could bear a fruit much sought-after in the Java community: a Java port to the Apple iPhone. Apple has not released a version of Java capable of running on the popular device. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early 2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone."

The key point of Mossberg's column was that iTunes may be a fine music player and music organizer, and an excellent vehicle to deliver users to Apple's online music store, but that there is a bigger point to consider, too: each installation of iTunes also installs Apple's Bonjour software, making the host machine an instant and potential participant on a Bonjour, or ZeroConf, dynamic network.

As Bonjour inventor Stuart Cheshire demonstrated in an hour-long Google TechTalk presentation (Flash video), Bonjour can be used to advertise and discover networked services over the WAN as well. This can be accomplished by adding extra bits of data to a host's DNS record. In this way, iTunes, Safari, or any other Bonjour-friendly program, can discover and use services that reside on other Internet hosts.

In contrast to Jini's reliance on Java and code mobility, Bonjour simply extends the existing DNS mechanisms, and uses a service's protocol type, defined as a string, in service discovery.

The beauty of the Jini vision was all kinds of devices and software discovering and communicating with one another, making networked services seamlessly useable by anyone.