Russell Beattie

So I was at the Java Expo yesterday (which was pretty freakin' useless) and there was a Java books stand by my fav CocodriloLibros and I saw that this book Java Bluetooth was there and almost bought it. I didn't because I noticed in the list of SDKs in the book (also here on line) that there were no open or free stacks that corresponded to Sun's javax.bluetooth package.

Hmm. That's too bad. I did a look on Google when I came home and found JBlueZ and Harald but both are way behind the level of functionality that the commercial vendors are providing. Hmm... that's not a great sign. Hopefully this will change as more hackers get phones/cards and want to use the spec. It'd be nice if Sun itself would release a stack.

It would be very, very cool if I could control my Bluetooth card from a standard Java program, actually. Jim has some great ideas along the lines of presence, and just doing things like syncing would be cool as well. Lots of uses actually... think about a corporate environment where everyone is walking around with a Bluetooth device in their pocket. Alerts could be sent out for meetings or phone calls, calendars and tasks could be synced with back end systems, etc. In a conference, all the slides could be made available, attendance could be noted in meetings, etc. Lots and lots of cool things could be done with this tech if I had full control of it via Java.

I'm not one to start an OSS project dedicated to some obscure networking stack, so it's just a waiting game for me, but I'm definitely looking forward to when this tech comes bundled with Java. ;-)

-Russ