A Look at Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW)

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While some might argue Qualcomm's shot at world domination of the cell phone transmission market, it's obvious that the company currently has good relations with many carriers and handset manufacturers worldwide. In fact, Qualcomm is currently so friendly with both carriers and manufacturers that it's managed to slip a "shim" (or wedge, if you will) between the two; or, more specifically, into the system that goes between a cell network and a handset. Qualcomm's shim, called BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), allows mobile developers to put code directly into a user's handset and execute it without worrying about network-level events, such as breaks for SMS messages. The resulting consumer goodies (such as location-based services, games, and specialized ring tones) are delivered directly to the user's handset by the cell network, usually by subscription, with profits shared by the developer, the carrier, and Qualcomm itself.

Qualcomm markets BREW as a kind of all-around application development and distribution platform for mobile developers: you build the app on the BREW SDK, send it to Qualcomm for certification, and Qualcomm distributes it to the carriers for you. The numbers show that the combination is proving addictive for a growing number of wireless developers (see Resources), but there is a hitch: unlike Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), BREW is proprietary technology, and apps developed using the BREW SDK must be certified by Qualcomm before they can be distributed.

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Adding JRuby to your Java Toolbox

JRuby is an alternate language for the Java platform. It is based on Ruby, a programming language developed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto. As stated on the RubyCentral homepage (see Resources), Ruby is a programming language that "combines the pure object-oriented power of the classic OO language Smalltalk with the expressiveness and convenience of a scripting language such as Perl." It is a relatively mature language, known for its clean, intuitive syntax and semantics and transparent, developer friendly programming model.

JRuby is a pure Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter. Like most languages discussed in this series, JRuby is both powerful and easy to learn. It incorporates the sophisticated text-processing of Perl, the iterators and closures familiar to Groovy developers, and the rapid development features of Jython and other languages discussed in this series. JRuby is also an interpreted language, so it can be run from the command line or used to evaluate simple expressions or blocks of code on the fly.

While JRuby doesn't try to be all things to all people, it certainly takes advantage of some of the milestone features found in its predecessors to form a powerful yet syntactically simple language. Unlike most languages discussed in this series, JRuby combines most of its powerful features into a single package. For example, JRuby combines iterators with text-processing features, making it relatively simple to write powerful yet intuitive parsers. It also lets us use functions as first class data types, which we can combine with blocks or closures to expand our classes to handle much of the grunt work typically left to loop constructs and more traditional iterator classes (like those found in the Java Collections framework).

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