Sun has submitted Java Specification Request (JSR) 233 J2EE Mobile Device Management and Monitoring Specification, to the Java Community Process (JCP). According to the JSR,
There is considerable interest in the Java Community in writing software applications that remotely manage the configuration and software residing on mobile devices. Currently, part of such a software application deals with the system integration task of building a particular set of business policies into such a system, and part of such a software application deals with the systems level details of how the management and monitoring can be supported for a heterogeneous class of mobile devices.
The proposed specification will define an extension to the J2EE platform to support management functionality with in J2ME based mobile devices; and will not depend on specific configurations or profiles of J2ME.
The extension will allow the applications to:
- Initiate reprovisioning of the platform software and libraries on devices on the wireless network, including provisioning new software and
- libraries, upgrading existing software and libraries to fix bug to get the new version, remove software and libraries.
- Initiate dynamic reconfiguration of the software and libraries, modifying default settings and configuration parameters and supporting security policies,
- initiate reprovisioning of new application level software onto the device, and remove, upgrade, version manage it.
- Provide a view of the software and application stack configuration of the remote device, including a dependency resolution mechanism.
- Monitor application usage on mobile devices for mobile devices supporting standard protocols for such purposes.
This functionality can be made accessible to various participants, e.g. Mobile Equipment OEM, Carrier, or even End User, under specific access roles.
This extension will not store the individual software components, but will contain the needed rule sets that will lead to the above described behaviour. To support the storage and delivery of the individual components, systems like provisioning servers will receive a notification from this extension and trigger the needed steps. Both access roles and management rules will than allow the enablement of such software applications on mobile devices.
The same kind of notification will be used to communicate monitoring information to network based management software applications.