The latest version of the standard set of technologies for Java-capable mobile devices has been finalized and Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the availability of the finished specification, a reference implementation, test suite and a beta version of a development toolkit.
The second version of the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP), which is a collection of standard APIs (application programming interfaces), includes support for secure HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), simple multimedia features such as audio and video, gaming, push applications and a new range of security functions. MIDP 2.0 was developed by around 50 companies and individuals as part of Sun’s Java Community Process and comes just over two years since MIDP 1.0 was first published. Like its predecessor, it seeks to define a basic set of APIs for inclusion in every mobile device that supports Java.
W3C updates validation service
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week released an update of its W3C Markup Validation Service and the accompanying Markup Validator, for checking documents such as HTML and XHTML files for conformance to W3C recommendations and other standards. Included in the upgrade are more accessible interfaces, support for more document types, better internationalization support, a “beefed up” Tip of the Day, and major internal restructuring.
Validation Service code has undergone significant re-factoring, yielding many benefits, according to the W3C. Code is now more readable and easier to understand and the service is more secure, more modular and performance should be significantly better, the W3C said. It has made output easier to understand, and bug fixes are included. The Validation Service is available at http://validator.w3.org.
Sun to release Java toolkit for StarOffice
Sun Microsystems Inc. will release a software development kit in the middle of next year that will allow businesses to customize applications in its open source StarOffice productivity suite to better suit their needs, an executive for the company said last month.
Sun’s StarOffice Software Developers Kit (SDK) is intended in part to make the productivity suite more competitive with Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite. It will allow developers to use Java in order to add custom features to the productivity software, by writing software plug-ins or customizing menus, for example, said Joerg Heilig, Sun’s director of engineering for StarOffice. Currently, StarOffice developers can tweak the software using a scripting language called StarOffice Basic, which is similar to Microsoft’s Visual Basic language, he said.