Not often do I get to talk about the extremely cool devices that we get to put our J9 Virtual Machine and class libraries into.  Unlike IBM’s Java SE SDKs which get a lot of press regarding benchmarks we in the embedded world often are under an NDA, some other agreement or just decide not to talk about it if the vendor doesn’t.

It makes it a little difficult to drum up business, in my opinion, if you’re constantly unable to toot your own horn and that of the company that’s got a significant investment in the relationship with IBM.  Sun does a much better job of this in the embedded space often announcing at the same time as the vendor.  I think we’d have more market share if we did this as well (and more money from licenses).

I’ve seen our technology go into Karaoke machines, music servers, Blu-ray players, set top boxes, cell towers, automobiles, fancy remote controls, millions of mobile devices (cell-phones) and many other pieces of hardware. I just don’t say which ones in particular.  In addition, our Java class libraries and port library are also at the core of every Android device out there (you’re welcome).

Back to the post....  The Vodafone Samsung H1/M1 devices appeared on LinuxDevices.com and clearly labelled J9 so I’m figuring I’m not the first to talk about them.  I’ve been waiting for these devices since I’ve been working on them from the beginning.  Somehow it’s extremely satisfying to have a tangible piece of hardware that ships out of the box with the software you’ve laboured on for many years (not this particular device for many years, but the VM, JCL and other portions of J9).

This product was the result of worldwide collaboration and it’s inspiring to talk about.  Inside IBM I met new colleagues on the other side of the world, ate some pretty interesting cuisine, had great technical discussions with a vendor and helped teams ship a significantly technical piece of machinery.

I’m quite passionate about embedded technology and love it when a plan comes together.