Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

6.6 WHY ALL THE FUSS ABOUT J2EE?

J2EE is certainly gaining a lot of momentum in the mobile services world, so we might well ask ‘why all the fuss?’ Firstly, we should reflect upon the circumstances we find ourselves in with next generation wireless services. As already ruminated, the plethora of next generation mobile service opportunities and emerging technologies is already quite mind-boggling; we might even say perplexing (which is perhaps why you're reading this book). Therefore, as much effort as possible needs to be expended in creating new services that meet all of the various criteria we have been suggesting throughout this book (e.g. usability, scalability and so on). This means we do not want to spend effort on building anything that is not going to add direct value to the effort, such as optimised load-balancing algorithms and interfaces to databases, mail server interfaces or XML content feeds.

Recently, several problems have hit mobile operators at the same time. The ARPU has been trailing off as the voice markets begin to saturate and consequently pricing becomes more competitive in attempts to lure customers from one service provider to another (churn). At the same time, non-voice services have become possible thanks to mobile data-networking technologies, new device technologies and a whole host of software technologies to chose from. This is a problem to the extent that operators are not sure what to do with the new technologies. With all this going on, there is ...