Sun Microsystems and the creators of the BlackBerry,
Research In Motion (Rim), will work together to extend enterprise
applications and data to the one million users of the handheld
device.
The partnership was announced at CTIA Wireless 2004 in
Atlanta and will use Sun's Java technology to deliver existing
enterprise applications via web services.
Sun and Rim developers will work with ISVs to ease the design
and deployment of mobile enterprise applications.
A number of third-party suppliers have already created versions
of its enterprise applications such as CRM, e-mail and ERP based on
the Java technology that runs on Rim's handheld device.
Scott McNealy, chief executive officer of Sun, spoke of Java's
success as a platform to deliver wireless applications at the
conference. He claimed Java has defeated .net, Microsoft's
development platform for web service-based applications, and
added that 500 million applications based on Java exist today.
Rim's Plazmic subsidiary introduced the Plazmic Content
Developer's Kit version 3.7. The kit allows developers to create
interactive and animated content for BlackBerry applications. The
tools generate content in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), an
XML-based standard for rich media content.