I was reading Glen Cordrey's
last J2ME column in this month's issue of JDJ. Glen mentions that, as the J2ME market has not matured with enough jobs, he is going back to J2EE and try to work on mobility integration issues in enterprise projects.
I complete agree with him and in fact, this is the point I have always advocated in my
writings. My keyword for mobility has always been "end-to-end."
Although my experience with the J2ME job market is somewhat different from Glen's (I have to turn down new J2ME contracts to keep myself sane at this point), I understand that not everyone in J2ME had the same luck. Most of the "real" employment opportunities are still on the enterprise server side.
But when we look at the future, I see three trends:
- The move to mobility is inevitable in the enterprise. The IT revolution has to reach hundreds of millions of mobile workers in order to realize its promise. There is no other way. However, the real question is how and when this will happen. With the IT over-investment in the last decade, it might take several more years.
- When enterprises move to mobility, a key consideration is to preserve existing investment. Fancy flashy J2ME games will not do it. The task is often to develop specialized gateway servers and J2ME integration software to incorporate smart mobile frontends into the system. That requires the developers to have deep understanding of both J2EE and J2ME. I think that the "end-to-end" sector is where the real opportunities are in the next several years. That is also what "Enterprise J2ME" is all about.
- Coding is a dying profession in the long run. If the jobs have not been outsourced to developing countries, the new generation of model-focused automatic code generation tools will eliminate the need for basic coders anyway. The jobs that have a future are system designing and architecting (the real engineering jobs). I think the ability to design end-to-end systems using whatever tools available is an important skill for the future.
Anyway, those are my observations for the mobility market in 2004.