Sun shows the way to wireless Internet

SANTA CLARA, California – The trend for organizations to come up with a wireless strategy is now becoming imperative with the rise of e-commerce. From wireless application standards such as WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) to compact HTML as used in NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode, Java is becoming the application platform of choice, thus living up to its claim of "write once, run anywhere."

Recently, Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com) announced the foundation for delivering advanced services over the wireless Internet. It unveiled its strategy, products, programs and services designed to leverage its expertise in the wired world of the Internet.

To fuel the growth of innovative wireless applications and services, Sun will be investing $100 million over the next year in companies creating innovative wireless technologies. Future investments may support companies exploring wireless technologies such as location services, streaming video to handheld devices, and security.

Is there a process for these companies to avail themselves of the fund? According to Timothy Dwyer, Sun VP for worldwide sales development and marketing for network service providers, there’s actually no process.

"They could come to any of the Sun organizations like in Singapore or through the iPlanet group. It doesn’t actually make any difference where they come from," Dwyer said. Sun Microsystems Phils. can also be approached.

Sun’s battlecry for Java adoption is more aggressive than ever in the wireless marketplace. The company recently began shipping the Mobile Information Device (MID) profile (http://www.java.sun.com/products/midp), a set of Java APIS designed to enable users of mobile information devices to securely download interactive services from the Internet.

Sun also announced the adoption of the MID profile, part of the Java 2 platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a standards body that is playing a key role in defining the future of wireless Internet.

Part of this body is the MeXe Working Group which is defining handset application environments. The working group recently announced it will include the MID profile, as well as J2ME technology, in the next version of its specification for 3GPP mobile handsets.

The MID profile is also widely adopted by other standard bodies such as for Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications.

The J2ME wireless toolkit (http://www.java.sun.com/products /j2metoolkit/index.html) is now available for download. This provides Java technology developers with the emulation environment, documentation and examples needed to develop MID profile-compliant applications and services. It is tightly integrated into Force for Java Community Edition, providing a complete development environment from start to finish at no cost.

In the Philippines, most wireless applications are developed through WAP. Asked about the security, flexibility and stability of applications built into WAP and SMS, such as Internet banking, Subodh Bapat, an engineer at Sun’s network services provider division, said, "Internet banking, stock trading and security applications being rolled out with the WAP model today are good because they have it worked out, but in the long-term, the end-to-end story we are putting together is the combination of Java on the device, Java on the back-end and IPv6 architecture that provides a secure communications protocol in between. "He explained, "WAP is a good technology because it showed us the way. It is the transition technology and in the end, we see the efficiency, scalability and security aspect will really be achieved using the combination of the two technologies. One is end-to-end IPv6 architecture because if you have IP end-to-end, you no longer have the need for gateways in the middle of the architecture such as in the case of WAP. They have something called the WAP gateway and that leads to security problems sometimes, and (also) to scalability problems. So we really see the end-to-end efficiency and security coming with IPv6."