A review of the Wireless Enterprise
Symposium - Part 2
In general, there was a lack
of developer related content. The training courses aside, there were no
sessions or tracks that were focused on developers. That is excusable
though because it was not a developer conference, it is an enterprise
conference. As a result many of the sessions were not terribly useful to
me, but there were enough sessions that were. Specifically, the
"Roadmap of the BES" session was worth the trip alone. This
session told all about all of the new features that RIM will be adding
to the next release of the BES and gave hints of more to
come.
Why was this so important to
me? As many of you may know or guess, I have been at a crossroad about
how to proceed as a consultant and developer in this "new era of
BlackBerry". Now that the 5810 is available, I have been asking
myself, "Can or should I continue to work in this niche?
Should I focus on J2ME or C++ or try to do both? Will there be a need
for BlackBerry specific J2ME applications? How will these hundreds of
thousands of J2ME developers affect me as developer?"
Its a tough question to
answer, but one thing is for sure - they've moved the cheese and we must
go find it again. (If you didn't catch that reference, read "Who
moved my cheese?". Go now. Yes, right now. I'll wait.)
In addition to the whole
2.5G, Java based SDK etc, the next version of the BlackBerry Enterprise
Server (BES), version 3.5 which will be released "in a few months",
is a major element in determining the course of how applications will be
developed and what applications can and will be made. What's so special
about BES 3.5? Three letters - M - D - S. Well it's a TLA really (TLA =
Three Letter Acronym which in itself is a TLA). Anyway, MDS stands for
Mobile Data Service. A rather generic name actually, but it is basically
an additional software package that "bolts" onto BES and
provides generic internet access to devices which are configured for
that server.
That's
right. No more struggling to get connections to the wireless networks,
writing special server programs, learning strange protocols and all of
the other difficulties which come with making your own applications.
This one hurdle is so big that it stops many companies from developing
client-server applications for the BlackBerry while still in the
research stage. With MDS installed, developers can have the same secure
(Triple DES encrypted) communication as emails and yet communicate to
ANY internet based computer that can normally be accessed for a desktop
within the company. It can be used to access web servers transferring
normal text or specialized services to transfer binary data using HTTP
tunneling.
Maybe this isn't news to
some people, but it was to me. I had heard things about this new server,
but I didn't fully understand it. If you don't see how this changes
everything when it comes to developing applications, I wager that you
don't understand it yet either.
There are still a number of
concerns about MDS however. First, the MDS server can only be used with
the new 5800 series of devices at least initially. I'm told that they do
plan to make it available for the 95X and 85X devices as well.
This would be a great move and would give additional life to these
devices as well. Of course the bandwidth is less, but a well designed
application could run well.
The other major concern with
MDS is that of pricing. Pricing is still not figured out, but I'm told
that it will be "up to the carrier" and most likely NOT part
of the standard flat rate for email. I fully expect the carriers to
price it so high that only large corporations with deep pockets can
afford it, but given how some carriers are struggling economically, they
may well price it out of the water.
Go to
Part 3
