Just as enterprise computing has exploded in the last five years, so has the marketplace for wireless devices. If it's a Blackberry Rim device, a Skytel pager, a Palm Plot VII, or a mobile phone, wireless devices are now inexpensive, plentiful, and easy to use. However, with this explosion of technology on the client side of the wireless equation, a hole has developed on the server side. To date, enterprise products like full-blown web servers and servlet engines have been squeezed and prodded into serving wireless clients. Programmers have tried to take existing solutions for server-side applications and force them into the packet-size limitations that wireless devices have. Code written for the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms have been commented and recompiled to meet the requirements for running in a smaller Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) environment.
On the client side, wireless devices have been treated as simple dumb terminals. Interactivity is, at best, no more complex than playing "Snake" on a Nokia mobile phone, and providing any real means of user interface remains over the horizon. The small memory footprint and class limitations of J2ME have kept wireless devices from being anything more than a novelty.
Today, all of that changes, once and for all!
The formation of the experts that make up the EnhydraME committers and technology experts has kicked off an initiative that will treat wireless devices as first class citizens. The projects that make up EnhydraME are not existing pieces of code written for some other purpose, and then ported to wireless as an afterthought. They are built, from the ground up, targeted at wireless platforms. This means that these solutions are the best in the business, and they're all open source, too!
In addition to the usefulness of the various projects that are a part of EnhydraME, the end result is a complete embeddable application server. The world is familiar with how application servers have exploded; Enhydra itself is certainly a testament to this. However, this power has never been more needed on a wireless platform than it is now. Imagine your phone not only sending tiny HTTP packets, but interacting with SOAP services. Imagine your pager, which doesn't have an email service, being email capablewith only an installation of the EnhydraME platform. Imagine your Palm Pilot interacting with JMS (the Java Message Service), with SOAP, with HTTP servers, speaking XML... all in ways that you can fully customize for your business needs. This is the promise of EnhydraME.
EnhydraME itself is only a framework, an assembly of smaller projects focused on specific pieces of the wireless puzzle. To get the complete picture of how EnhydraME solves today's wireless problems, you'll need to understand these projects. They currently include:
In addition to these existing projects, there are several future areas that EnhdyraME is already focusing on. While there are currently not projects in these areas, submissions, ideas, and visionaries who are interested in these areas should get involved. The concepts listed in this section are all works in progress, and meant to serve as a guideline for the future of EnhydraME.