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BREW, Java and Symbian: Calling All Apps


Strategies for enabling enterprise over cellular phones

By Edward J. Correia
May 15, 2002 — 
Your CEO has just dropped a bomb. You have six months to make your company's customer relationship management application available to all of the company's salespeople from anywhere in their territories. But here's the kicker: You have to do it without buying any new hardware. What will you do? Although many organizations are placing handheld computers at the heart of their wireless strategy, an option worth exploring is the intelligent cellular telephone, equipped with an application stack such as Qualcomm's BREW, Sun's Java or Symbian's OS, a trio of contenders vying for market acceptance.

While there certainly are other niche players available or soon to be, including mobile phones based on Palm's Palm OS, RIM's Blackberry and Microsoft's ever-forthcoming "Stinger" Windows CE-based operating system, many developers may choose to focus on the broader devices and platforms. "If you want to enable the bulk of your mobile work force with enterprise apps, you have to think cell phones," said Jeremy James, senior director of marketing at mobile-phone pioneer Qualcomm Inc. (www.qualcomm.com), which develops and markets BREW, the Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless. James said BREW, which is used extensively in Korea, has been deployed in several other pockets around the world and will soon be offered across the U.S. by Verizon.

James claimed that Qualcomm is the only single-vendor cell phone application vendor. "[With other vendors,] you have to piece together your own system. You get the development environment from here, the provisioning system from there and the carrier from another place. With BREW, we offer not just the environment, but the wireless downloading system from the developer's computer all the way to the end-user download server."

James said developers use the free BREW tools to build small executable modules that enable mobile users to have "focused utility, and to deploy the most important aspects of their current desktop applications in a wireless app." He said developers going wireless need to begin thinking about what views of the information will be most useful for a particular user. "You might have a salesman [and] service tech who are generally sharing a single data store, but are interested in different elements of the information. What would be most useful to them when they are mobile? And what would be practical given the memory, processing and UI constraints of a cell phone? The idea of shrinking Oracle down to fit on a handset is probably the wrong way to think about this," he said.

Of course, some organizations may find a single-vendor strategy like BREW to be dangerous, preferring to have more of a choice. While, ultimately, Java technology comes from Sun Microsystems Inc., many manufacturers build Java 2 Micro Edition-based handsets. Indeed, Sun has recently directed considerable resources at giving developers a place to start.

In April the company launchedwireless.java.sun.com, a portal dedicated to wireless Java development. Maryann Rayner, the site's editor, said that among the major challenges is keeping up to date on dimensions and capacities of the variety of wireless devices that might be out there; Sun says there are currently 65 Java-enabled phones using 11 wireless communications technologies.

"It's one thing to know the sizes; it's another to implement [applications to them]," she said. Because in addition to variations in processor power, RAM and screen size, some programming concerns are carrier-specific. "About 75 to 80 percent of your code you write once," she said. "Then when you go on a specific phone or carrier, you pay attention to different things. When a device is coupled with a back-end server, as with end-to-end implementations, you've got security, threads, sessions and data-synchronization concerns."

Paul Pangaro, Sun's senior director of developer Web services, admitted that Java can't solve all the problems a wireless developer will face. Among them is deployment, which is still in the hands of carriers, phone manufacturers and other third parties such as portal providers. "We address the issue on the site," he said, "but that will continue to develop as carriers become more capable of helping developers get stuff to end users."

Presenting a third option is the Symbian OS, which offers both a native development environment and a JVM. Developed by Symbian Ltd. (www.symbian.com), a consortium of cell phone manufacturers that includes Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic and Sony/Ericsson, Symbian OS offers developers a choice among Java, C++ and Visual Basic, with tools available from Borland, Metrowerks and AppForge.

Paul Cockerton, Symbian's head of communications, said developers' primary concern when seeking to mobilize enterprise apps should be availability of phones that will run their code. "For a developer, one of the things you want to know about is, 'Are there going to be devices out there?' More than 70 percent of the mobile industry has already started developing Symbian OS phones. The question [becomes], do they want to write in Java, C++ or Visual Basic?"

Symbian OS also gives developers an operating system that Cockerton said is consistent from one phone vendor to another, with source code available. "It's the same Symbian OS that goes into each phone; 80 percent of [native application] code will be the same," Cockerton asserted, adding that the only differences will be hardware-specific. "The developer will need to optimize for a particular phone, and take into account what buttons the phone has, the size of the screen and each phone's interface."

For Java apps, Symbian relies on carriers and Web portals for deployment over the air. For native apps, Cockerton said there are other options. "It's still [in a] fairly early stage as yet, but apps can be put on the phone [prior to] production, for instance by Nokia, or they can be included in the platform, as we've done with the Opera Web browser." As for enterprise applications, testing requirements vary by carrier, he said, and most will want to perform some.

Qualcomm's James said that his company also relies on carriers for enterprise application deployment. "The BREW-enabled handset touches the application download server inside the carrier's network and the carrier acts as the retailer of the app." But James drew a clear distinction between Java apps, which run through a JVM and can be downloaded wirelessly, and native apps of the BREW environment, which are controlled.

"In our experience, carriers are not too keen on things going on phones that they don't know about. Part of our security model is that the BREW Distribution System does not allow the anonymous downloading of apps. Java apps are 'sandboxed,' so theoretically they can't crash the phone or the network. But by the same token, there is a limit to their functionality. The ability to reach deeply into the phone makes apps more powerful. BREW apps can do a lot because they can integrate with core phone functionality. The phone and the network are protected because apps are tested and only distributed via wireless download from the carrier."

Cockerton claimed that the Symbian OS includes safeguards against errant native code. "Because of the rigorous architecture of the Symbian OS, we take care to make sure things don't crash. And we manage all the interrupts of a particular application so you can run and take calls and manage different processes all at the same time."

But Cockerton added that another competitive advantage for Java developers writing to Symbian's JVM over those atop proprietary operating systems is that it might save them from having to write any native code. "Symbian has been working closely with Sun on its JavaPhone [API], which permits Java applications to call a phone's native APIs" and directly access the device's hardware functions, such as dialing and sending messages. "When Java is written to a proprietary OS, that's more difficult." Some carriers, including SprintPCS, have developed their own extensions to J2ME, enabling direct hardware access on particular devices.

But Qualcomm's James contended that BREW is superior due to its ability to operate in more constrained hardware environments than the so-called smartphones needed to run Java. "What enterprise wants to have a smartphone as a primary pillar of its mobile strategy? If you can begin by provisioning appropriately designed apps on cell phones, then you're able to touch all of your mobile users. The fact that some will already have smartphones means some will be able to do more."


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