Sun Microsystem simplifies Java developments for mobile phone; embraces Orange, Vodafone, Sony

In a recent development, Sun Microsystem has joined hands with mobile phone majors Orange, Vodafone Group and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications to make it easier and cheaper for the developers to bring Java programs to mobile phones. On Tuesday, Sun Microsystem released the new open-source testing tools in JavaOne developers conference in San Francisco. The company revealed that it was upgrading the five-year-old Java Verified program used to certify Java ME programs on mobile devices. This comes as a relief for the developers tired of seamless unproductive testing.

With the revamp, Sun aims at simplifying the process and reduce the number of tests that software developers have to run to nsur that their programs will run smoothly on different phones.

Martin Wrigley, director of technology with Orange’s partner program, while talking in a press conference clarified that no developer likes testing. Further, as the mobile app market thrives developers would be doing most of the testing themselves.

Actually, the major concern is that different networks sell different devices and have different requirements. Now if a developers wants his product to reach a large number of users he has to perform a several testing. This would also require a huge expenditure. For a single test a developer might have to invest something around US $200. This can rise up fast as the number of tests increase. Just Imagine, there are some developers who maintain 14000 versions of their product. According to Wrigley the new testing methodology would reduce upto 50 percent of the cost of testing.

Sun Java has dominated the mobile phone market for long, until recently where overshadowed by the iPhone and Google’s Android.

Some of the most popular applications of Java include Pullface and Bob the Belcher. However, users would be looking for same sort of application like the one’s offered for iPhone in Apple’s App Store.

With Java ME programs getting more sophisticated it will become even more important when the developers would be handling intricate applications. The new methodology would reduce the number of testing that would reduce the cost of testing in turn.

Carl-Eric Mols, director of software strategies with Sony Ericsson says

There are about 200 million high-end handsets on the market, and that number will quadruple in the next few years

He explains that although the high-end phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry hogs the limelight, still the majority of handsets are regular phones with Java ME.

However, there were no clear indications on impact of Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems on the proceedings.