Software Artist

I just released version 1.0-RC2 of MobiMap library. Amongst the features I’ve added are:

• better icons for screen controls
• better support for touch screen devices with a new zoom slider
• all strings are now internationalized in French and English
• a help screen with all the active shortcuts when you hit 5 numeric key
• it is now possible to customize all shortcuts programmatically

More information on the official site.

And if you want to test a demo application using MobiMap component, just point your mobile browser to http://mobimap.epseelon.org/mobimap.jad

We’d love to hear your feedback.

We needed a reusable mapping component for TagSpot development, and we wanted it to be Open Source so that everyone can reuse it and improve it for the general interest. There was no such library available on the environment we’re working on so… we made it!

And here comes MobiMap. MobiMap is a library that offers a reusable and customizable mapping component for several mobile platforms. Today, we’re releasing the first release candidate for version 1.0 of the JavaME version. We’re still working on porting this library to Windows Mobile and iPhone environments, and we’ll release the final version of all three libraries at the same time. Until then, we need feedback from mobile developers and we need help to improve the library.

The project website is on http://mobimap.epseelon.org
Out support forum is on http://groups.google.com/group/mobimap
Our issue tracker is here: http://bugs.epseelon.org
MobiMap’s Subversion repository is here: http://svn.epseelon.org/mobimap-javame

Special Thanks go to…

First I would like to thank developers of Pyx4Me and Microemulator, thanks to which we could develop this library on the Mac.

I would like to thank Romain Guy, Richard Bair and the whole SwingLabs Team: MobiMap component is heavily inspired from JXMapViewer Swing component.

Special thanks also go to Antoine Jacquet, aka Royale, whose blog article about tile providers really helped me a lot in understanding all the tile APIs.

And last but not least, thanks to the whole TagSpot team for their help and support.

Finally, if you want to see what MobiMap can do on your phone, you can type the following URL on your phone: http://mobimap.epseelon.org/mobimap.jad. Or if you’re just too lazy to type this URL and you know how to use a QRCode, you can use the one on the right.

Be careful though, as MobiMap will download quite a bit of map data over your mobile connection so…

I love Apple. I confess I’m a pure fanboy, writing this post on a Macbook Pro I’m very proud of, and I really admire what Steve Jobs has managed to do with this company in just more than 10 years since he returned. But yesterday he did another of these annoying things I really hate: he denigrated a competitor. I mean, when you have great products like Apple does, you don’t need to do that sort of things, and if you do, it obviously means that you are afraid of them.

So when Steve Jobs says that “Flash is not suited for the iPhone“, I don’t hear “Flash will never be available on the iPhone” but “Flash will eventually adapt to the iPhone and when this day comes, we’ll have to deal with it.” The truth is that Adobe has been doing huge things with Flash lately, thanks to Flex. And I’m sure Steve is aware of that. And I see absolutely no coincidence in him spreading that kind of FUD on the same day he’s announcing the iPhone SDK.

For months, Apple has been telling us that we didn’t need any SDK for the iPhone, because we could just write standard AJAX web applications, which is nothing more than a transitional form of rich internet application. Now that the SDK is out (and it really amazes me by the way, but that’s another topic), the web application way of doing things looks really poor in comparison, both more complex to use and less integrated than its heavyweight client alternative. But what if Adobe comes up with a Flash runtime for the iPhone supporting Flash 9 and Tamarin? Then we will have Flex applications on the iPhone, in other words easy-to-develop apps, with no need to go through the App Store. And if Adobe does things right and uses the full power of the iPhone APIs, maybe we could have some special capabilities to integrate multi-touch and other advanced features into our rich mobile applications.

Wouldn’t it be great?!

Now the question is, if Adobe comes with such an adapted Flash support, will Apple accept this alternative and pre-install it on all new iPhones?

I really hope so… But what do you think?

Whenever I talk about Flex and other Adobe stuff with colleagues and geeks I know, sometimes I get the annoyed answer like “Adobe is evil, it’s proprietary code, there’s a governance issue.” Of course the implicit assumption is that Sun Microsystems does it so much better. Well, let me tell you a story about Sun Microsystems’ tremendous governance.

At this time, I’m trying to put together a prototype for a mobile service of mine, using Java Mobile Edition and several of its optional API’s. One of those API’s is core to my application since it is what I use to connect to my backend server: JSR172, aka Web Services API. When I started this prototype, I knew that using optional API’s is risky, because not all cell phones out there support all of them. But it’s a prototype, I just want to make sure it works on my own super-phone (Nokia N95 8GB), and I’ll try to find a solution later for other phones.

So I ordered my very expensive phone and while I was waiting for it, I started working on my J2ME application. I tested it under Sun’s reference implementation Wireless ToolKit and everything worked just great. Then I downloaded the Nokia toolkit and there I had an issue, something cryptic like “(1) Missing end tag for body or envelope”. I thought it had to be an issue related to the beta version of the toolkit, so when I got my phone, I deployed it there and boom: same error. No way to connect to my backend server! Then I started to get nervous. I left a message on forum.nokia.com, and nobody seems to be able to give me serious options.

So now I’m stuck with an application that works great on Sun’s reference implementation, but nobody uses their implementation on their phones. It could be that Nokia did a bad job reimplementing the specification. But if Sun had done things right, there would be a comprehensive compatibility test that would enforce all the implementations to work the same. Or at least, there would be the option to replace the phone implementation with theirs. But wait, outside of the WTK, the WSA page has not been updated since June 2005! Come on!

No wonder why Google Android and Nokia Qtopia are working on alternatives…

Sometimes I like to believe that my passion for technology watch gives me this little je ne sais quoi that allows me to determine with a pretty good accuracy whether a given technology is going to be huge or not. Of course sometimes I’m proven wrong, most of the time because something else comes in the way and changes everything. But this time…

If you want to bet on technology horses, here are my tips for the 5 years to come:

• Rich Internet Applications, and more specifically Flex
• Model-Driven Architecture, and more specifically AndroMDA
• Service-Oriented Architectures, and more specifically… nothing in particular, flexible solutions first and foremost (maybe we have to find another name for it before IBM and others make it disappear under tons of marketing crap)
• Semantic Web, including RDF, OWL & Co.
• And my special mention today goes to… the one that just reappeared in my top 5: MOBILE SERVICES!

Of course I’m talking about Google’s Android.

Yes, I know, my opinion is biased, I usually love everything Google does, because I can’t help admiring the creativity they are able to generate and the innovation they drive. But hey, I’ve been doing Java ME development on my free time for a few years now, and each time I came back to it, it was like a huge pain: all this fragmentation, impossible to use even the simplest services on my own 6-month old phone… and I don’t even mention this crappy emulator. And now I can’t even develop on my Mac!

Well, guess what! I’ve only been playing with Android for a few minutes, and it has a great development environment (even if I’m still waiting for the IntelliJ integration), a very good-looking emulator, and the API seems really simple to use. And when you read all the industry commitment there is behind it with the Open Handset Alliance, and you start to imagine this could become THE industry standard, with all its openness and non-fragmentation. That’s really exciting!

You know what, that’s what I’ll never like with Sun Microsystems: they have this very annoying tendancy to let go, to release a big clumsy technology, and to rest on the fact that they are the first one on this market. And then they wait. They have done it with J2EE (those who do EJB’s, raise your hands! that’s what I thought…), Spring & Co have created something better, now they’re trying to catch up with JSF and EJB3, but I doubt they will make it. And now it could happen with J2ME: they have neglected mobile platforms for too long, and now they’re going to pay the price. Do I believe that JavaFX Mobile is going to change it? Look, I haven’t seen a single working environment with it yet, but why not. Time will tell!

What about you? What horses would you bet your savings on?