by Tommi Mikkonen and Antero Taivalsaari

October 17, 2008 - In this paper, Sun Labs researchers Tommi Mikkonen and Antero Taivalsaari summarize their experiences in porting the Sun™ Lively Kernel — an exceptionally interactive web programming environment written entirely in JavaScript™ — onto a Nokia N810 mobile device. They report experiences based on two different approaches. First, they ported the system onto a regular web browser running in the mobile device. Second, they developed a custom-built native execution environment that provides more direct and extensive access to the underlying resources of the system. Based on these experiments, they discuss the lessons learned as well as provide directions and guidance for future work.

Why we did it - Tech Report Overview :
The software industry is currently experiencing a major disruption. In the past few years, the World Wide Web has become the de facto deployment environment for new software systems and applications. Software applications that were previously targeted to specific operating systems, CPU architectures or devices, are now written for the Web, to be used from web browsers from all over the world. A good example of this trend is iExpense, Sun's new expense reporting system that is used by Sun's employees worldwide.

Web applications have major benefits. In particular, they require no installation or manual upgrades, and they can be deployed and shared instantly worldwide. This "instant gratification" aspect will dramatically change the way people develop, deploy and use software. Ultimately, it will cause a paradigm shift in the software industry — in the same fashion as the Web has already transformed the sharing and distribution of documents, books, photos, music, videos and so many other artifacts.

There is another parallel transition currently occurring in the software industry: mobile devices are becoming an important application platform and a gateway to the Web. While the Web has conventionally been accessed from a personal computer, the increasing CPU speeds, memory capacity, network bandwidth and "all-you-can-eat" monthly network service plans are rapidly making mobile web usage and mobile software applications more practical.

These two transitions — the movement towards web-based software and towards web-enabled mobile devices — are transforming the software industry. In the long run, the popularity of the Web will likely make it the most important software application platform in the world. In the same fashion, the popularity of mobile devices — there are already nearly three billion mobile device users today — will probably lead us to a common web application platform that can be used with different types of terminals, including desktop computers and mobile devices.