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Technology Industry

Pervasive Computing Era - Industry Trend or Event

Software Magazine, April, 2000 by Dan Kara

Get ready to integrate intelligent devices into the enterprise

The long-awaited era of convergence, now called "pervasive computing," is fully upon us. Billboards, as well as print and electronic media, proclaim it so. You can now access and interact with information and services instantly from anywhere in the world. The "office" is as near as your smart phone. Whether this is a good thing for our collective soul, I will leave to the more philosophical among you to debate. But what is not arguable is that for the business community, the ability to access and share any type of information, anytime, anywhere, using intelligent devices such as handheld PCs (HPCs), personal digital assistants (PDAs), and smart phones, is extremely compelling. Think cost-effectiveness, increased productivity, better client service, and the ability to put the touch on perspective customers across geographical boundaries.

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To support these devices, thc role of the corporate developer will have to change somewhat. It will become necessary to bridge the widely differing worlds of embedded systems and device development and classic corporate application development. This simply could not be accomplished previously. The two worlds differed radically and required two distinct, mutually exclusive competencies. This is no longer the case. The emergence and employment of certain standard platforms, specifically the Windows CE, Palm, and Symbian EPOC computing platforms, along with the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) specification, now make it possible for some classes of corporate developers to build business applications where the end-user client is some type of handheld, intelligent device.

Standard Platforms

While the Windows CE, Palm, and Java platforms are well known, Symbian is much less so. Symbian is a vendor consortium consisting of communication heavyweights Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Psion, that is working to make the EPOC32 operating system, developed by U.K.-based Psion PLC, the de facto standard for wireless information devices, such as smart phones and communicators. By 2002-2003, the consortium believes it will sell 50 million keyboard and phone products per year.

In the past, the employment of standard platforms was an anathema to the embedded development world, but times have changed and the implications for embedded and corporate developers are profound. For example, the high-volume consumer market is dominated by price, thus memory and CPU resources are minimized to maintain the pricing structure for high-volume markets. This typically meant writing software in assembly language, a practice largely beyond the grasp of corporate developers, to satisfy the tight memory constraints. Today, memory and CPU technologies are just now reaching the point where the minimum-cost hardware design sometimes has more capacity than is strictly required for the application. Thus, for certain classes of applications a CE, Palm, Symbian, or Java platform solution is now practical.

Standard platforms limit the targeted technical domain, but also increase the feasibility of employing platform solutions for building systems fronted by intelligent, handheld devices. For corporate IS, "pervasive computing" basically maps to handheld devices supporting data input, storage, and output, and some type of visual display, along with Internet and e-mail access, with personnel productivity applications (contact management and scheduling at a minimum) thrown in to boot. Thus, at one level a personal information manager is a handheld computer is a smart phone.

This is not to say that platform solutions are limited to devices supporting corporate computing. Windows GE was designed to support computing devices ranging from corporate handheld computers to TV set-top boxes to smart cards. Similarly, while the J2ME framework was specifically designed to meet the needs for corporate small devices with sophisticated displays, the specification contains profiles representing a variety of consumer device types. The profiles map to a set of APIs that support that device type, along with a specification for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) supporting those APIs. In either case, however, both the CE and J2ME platforms are optimized for a limited number of device types.

Over time, the number of device types supported by CE, J2ME, Symbian, and Palm platforms will be expanded. The implication of this expansion extends beyond the simple number of supported device types. Standard platforms offer a level of abstraction that reduces the amount of low-level coding required to interoperate with hardware, operating systems, databases, middleware, and so on. With each release, the number of platform targets increases, while the difficulty of writing for the supported devices decreases. Also, the abstraction level that standard platforms provide lessens the constraints on software design, which in the embedded development realm was formerly dictated completely by the hardware design. The employment of standard platforms also increases the interoperability between disparate device types that share little in common except the standard software platform upon which they are built.

Technology Industry

Pervasive Computing Era - Industry Trend or Event

Software Magazine, April, 2000 by Dan Kara

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