At booth 618 in the JavaOne Pavilion, Ericsson will demonstrate the possibilities that converged multimedia services allow and show the free tools that developers can use to create innovative services today.

Visitors to Ericsson’s booth can see demos of end-to-end, converged multimedia applications, some created with free developer tools that can be downloaded from the Ericsson Mobility World Developer Program.

Erik Eriksson, Java developer at the Developer Program, will demonstrate a mobile client-server application that allows users to update – and subscribe to – blogs with the help of multimedia messages (MMS).

“In this example, Jane is out backpacking in Southeast Asia and uses her camera phone to update her travel blog with photos and reports about her adventures. She can do this by sending MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) messages to her weblog application, which she has built with our free Telecom Web Services SDK,” Eriksson says.

Back in San Francisco, Jane’s husband John is at work. After reading Jane’s latest report from Angkor Wat in Cambodia, he enters a post on his own blog about his day in the cubicle. Jane, who subscribes to John’s blog, receives his post via MMS just as she gets back to her hostel in Siem Reap.

“The Telecom Web Services SDK makes the development of these kinds of applications relatively easy,” says Peter Yeung, chief strategist at the Developer Program. “A library of Java SE components makes telecom network capabilities such as SMS, MMS, terminal status, WAP push and location available to applications as plain JavaBeans.”

Other free developer tools on show include the Mobile Front Controller SDK and the Service Development Studio (SDS). Mobile Front Controller is a Java EE web framework that allows developers to use a shared user-interface logic for both web browsers and mobile browsers. SDS is an end-to-end tool for developing applications based on IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem, a standard for delivering converged multimedia services that bridges telecommunication and internet technology).

The booth will have three demos of converged multimedia services that integrate several communication channels, including mobile telephony, television, instant messaging and presence, and the web.

Marc LeClerc, manager of Ericsson’s global IMS expert center, explains one of the core ideas behind this next generation of services:

“Traditionally, you first chose a channel and a format – telephony for voice or instant messaging for text – and then you chose who to contact. But convergent multimedia applications enable services that are available to users on any screen: their mobile phone, TV or PC. If you want to communicate with someone, you first choose who, and then communicate through multiple channels.”

IMS service components such as presence, chat, and file transfer, for example, are likely to be the building blocks of future converged multimedia services. These components will become easily accessible when Java Specification Request (JSR) 281, IMS Services API, is finalized. The JSR is now in its final ballot, which is expected to be rounded up at the end of May.

By Olle Blomberg