Future for Java Mobile Edition Uncertain with Oracle

For those of you who may not know, Sun Microsystems was recently acquired by Oracle. But what is the relevance for this bit of info? Well, for one, Sun Microsystems is the developer of Java Mobile Edition (formerly J2ME) – the ones you see advertised on smartphones and the the basis of most third-party applications for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphone, and Google’s Android platform uses Java at the application level.

Since the acquisisition, a lot of questions have been surfacing regarding the future of this technology. Oracle has said Java was its biggest reason for buying Sun, but the move may have had more to do with enterprise uses of Java than the mobile arena.

This could probably mean that Java’s role in handsets may decline as Oracle is not really focusing their efforts in this field. Sun has licensed and promoted mobile Java freely for mobile handsets with an eye to selling more enterprise Java servers to mobile operators. But it hasn’t played a strong role in guiding the mobile technology, instead allowing software and hardware vendors and carriers to develop a variety of Java virtual machines (JVMs). That has led to a plethora of Java-enabled phones and mobile Java applications, but also complaints about fragmentation that makes life harder for developers.

After the acquisition, Oracle’s most important issues would have to be integrating Sun to its own business. But sources are saying that J2ME is not going to be what Oracle is going to want to focus on.

However, others are thinking the opposite. founder of Mobile Research, David Adams said that Oracle could just keep on going in the same direction or become more aggressive because this gives Oracle an entree into the mobile market.

The mobile application environment is starting to shift toward applications that rely on the Web and thus on back-end databases of the kind that Oracle sells. That means Oracle has an incentive to continue to support Java in the mobile environment because Java enables mobile Web applications that could spur more sales for Oracle.

With all the different platforms out there, developers could certainly use a write once run anywhere type of solution. Java (J2ME) seemed a perfect solution for this a few years ago. But most recently, developers are opting to to write web applications which are perfect for this situation. Whatever happens, we all just have to wait and see.