Joe Polastre: January 2008 Archives

Sentila is in full force at the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days (M&EDD) today in Santa Clara. The day started off with a great keynote from James Gosling, who said that one of his original goals was to run Java on the multitude of mobile devices. He went on to talk about Extreme Java -- controlling helicopters, submarines, and others -- and ended with a shout out to Sentilla. James displayed Sentilla's Tmote Mini next to a Canadian penny (he is Canadian, after all) and talked about how miniature embedded computers are the future of Java, especially when it comes to the ubiquitous large-scale use of Java. He spoke about solving the bridge safety problem using Sentilla's software suite to detect the health and stresses of bridges to detect potential problems before they occur, such as the bridge in Minnesota that collapsed.

Below is a picture from Mary's blog entry:

I spoke about the real world commercial uses of pervasive computing. In my research, I realized that Sentilla is essentially running Java on a computer with the power of a PDP-11 from 1970, which is very cool (Gordon Bell would be proud). I also showed a picture of a container yard and explained, "You may see containers, but what we see is over a million tiny servers." Making dumb things smart, useful, and more valuable through pervasive computing is key, and Java makes application development light years easier than any of the embedded programming approaches.

Andrew, David, and I brought along our awesome drink coasters and demonstrated how simple and easy they are. We also showed how a group of coasters can make decisions on their own without some big clunky server sitting around -- after all, the coasters do have computers running Java. Attendees also got a glimpse at Beta 2 of the Sentilla Software Suite which we are rolling out to more and more customers every day. If you have submitted your info yet, please do it so we can contact you and get you into the beta program.

Other blogs are also covering the event. See Mary's blog and Stephen's blog for some immediate reactions to embedded Java. The Dev Days guys are posting slides, and will be posting the video from the conference in a few weeks.

I will be participating and talking about pervasive computing at the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days conference at the Sun campus in Santa Clara, CA. The conference takes place on January 23rd and 24th. On the first day, the 23rd, are a slew of talks from our friends in Sun Labs working on Sun SPOTS, followed by a half hour technical discussion of the commercial use of Java in embedded pervasive applications by Sentilla.

In the most recent Developer Days update sent out to the community, Sentilla and I are previewed as one of the upcoming talks. Check out the newsletter.

The agenda for this conference looks very exciting. Some of my interests are the phoneME discussion, Bruce Boyes' robots, and of course the keynote by James Gosling. Space is extremely limited to no more than 300 attendees and so you have to register soon if you want to attend! Visit the Developer Days website for more information and registration.