Zac Bowling’s Blog

There a lot of new standards and formats coming out out there that require an implementation of Java to be compliant I’ve noticed lately, and its seems to be growing. I just can’t figure it out. Is there nothing better for what they are trying to achieve?

For example, Blu-ray requires an implementation of Java on all Blu-ray players to run the interactive menus on those systems. The Blu-ray menus are stored in Java byte code and the player’s embedded Java runtime runs this content. I think this is partly might be why Microsoft is so adamant with pushing HD-DVD over Blu-ray (HD-DVD’s menu system is stored in a standardized document format). If Microsoft ever wanted to support Blu-ray in the XBox 360 or in Windows Media Player it would probably require embedding some form of Java (which would happen the next time there is a cold day in hell) or by converting Java code to .NET like IKVM.NET or their Java to J# class converter. It pretty much isn’t going to happen which is a bad thing because I believe Blu-ray is better then HD-DVD in almost everyway (except for requiring Java).

Java is also a requirement on the new OpenCable based Cable Card system (this is CableCard 2.0 basically) as part of the new OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). It requires anyone that has a OCAP compatible TV or PVR to host an implementation of Java to display the content. This is so your cable provider can send down their own menu system in Java byte code to display on your TiVOs and new CableCard ready TVs (not something I’m looking forward to since right now they show banner ads on 1/4 of the screen with their on screen menu guide on my current cable box) and how to change the channel and send back data in their own protocols to order things like on demand services and PPV since all the cable providers can’t seem to decide on a common two way protocol for these services. What sucks is that cable providers need something that lets them control how you request and change the channel if they want to add any more channels, convert more to HD, or have more on demand content (google for switched cable service) and I hope they don’t require OCAP to do that and the FCC steps in to prevent it.

What annoys me is that our government, specifically the FCC, looks to CableLabs (the company who came up with this OCAP standard) for the standards that they want to enforce the all the cable companies and television manufactures to use. The FCC enforced the first CableCard standard, and if they enforce this one, the FCC will be enforcing Java on everyone. It would be good to mention that Microsoft is working in this same field as well with the partnerships with Comcast for their television delivery platform, and also AT&T and Verizon (FiOS) to work with them on their IP based TV services on their own proprietary system.

Java is also the only development platform on a good number of cell phones out there also (which probably isn’t news to anyone). J2ME’s dominance isn’t that big of a deal I guess since Symbian, Windows Mobile, BREW, Palm, Blackberry, and others provide us with various alternatives which are usually a lot better then using Java. Java probably will continue to rule as the platform of choice on all the cheap-o phones.

Java is now even influencing the design of all the new ARM chips out there. Jazelle extensions are pretty much required to be ARM compliant now which is great for speeding up those slow J2ME apps by running Java byte code (with some slight assistance) at almost an instruction level. It was created out of need since J2ME is horribly slow on most cell phones and usually requires long compile times when first loaded. Jazelle makes me cringe because we can’t get the docs on how these new op codes work to use for anything else except for Java, which could possibly help someone speed up something like .NET, Mono, LLVM, or any other JITed platform when running on ARM.

This all has to make Sun so happy. Heck, they even renamed their stock symbol to “JAVA”. But still why Java?

For Blu-ray and OCAP, the companies designing the content want something that has lots of flexibility (a programming language and platform provide them that but a good standard would probably be better in the long run). The companies building the hardware for the players, cable boxes, and TVs want a format that is secure and can run in a protected environment like a VM that they can be tightly controlled, and is portable between any current or future hardware.

For TV and Video services, Java fits the requirements I guess, but it seems like there are so many other and possibly better alternatives. If you want a platform that you can control, that runs in a VM, just off the top of my head, you’ve got Python, LLVM (for all the GCC languages), Mono/.NET, and bunch of others (not to mention you could roll your own basic scripting like language or custom binary format as part of the standard). It seems to make sense more then trying to provide a development platform, to create set of non propitiatory standards (possibly based on XML to keep it simple) to handle these types of services and handle almost every situation that you need. On top of that, you could possibly provide your own development platform that uses that data but it’s use remain strictly optional for the end user. For the current uses of JavaTV and JMF (Java multimedia framework) in the OCAP and Blu-ray standards, it would probably benefit the consumers so much more in the end if they did that.

Honestly, I believe Java has a lot of inherit issues that pretty much can’t get fixed without breaking most backward compatibility (to many things to cite here), which is why I contribute to and support Mono and .NET. For the record though, I don’t hate Java though, and I spend a good amount of time at work developing in it. It just seems like there are so many better alternatives.

One of the only things good about it all is that at least Java isn’t entirely proprietary anymore (although good many of the common libraries, frameworks, and implementations remain that way).