For those of you that are Europeans or are traveling to the EWSN 2008 conference in Bologna, Italy, I will be giving a talk on the technical aspects of running Java in resource-constrained environments. Attendees will learn how to write Java programs for small embedded computers (microcontrollers) and I'll step through some of the technical challenges that Java can help resolve in the areas of power management, cross layer communication, and reuseable software components. The talk is on Wednesday morning on the first day of the conference, so show up early!

Pervasive Computing is about making the real world -- and everything in it -- smarter, through the use of small, wireless, battery-powered computers (often called "motes") that can be put anywhere or attached to anything. By moving beyond wireless sensing to a full computing environment, pervasive applications can revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. Pervasive applications range from automatically watering your plants when they need water to tracking millions of containers as they move goods throughout the world.

Conventional wisdom asserts that low-power resource-constrained systems are incapable of running fully featured computing environments, such as Java. This talk shows the basic architecture of a pervasive computer, the unique resource constraints in pervasive computing, a Java Micro Edition (JavaME) platform extended to pervasive computing by Sentilla, and techniques for developing and debugging applications distributed across large numbers of pervasive computers. Java-powered systems require efficient kernel design and cross-layer communciation between Java applications and low-level kernel operations. Applications must be written with resource and power constraints in mind, and services must transcend traditional layered boundaries to efficiently execute applications. To achieve these goals, Sentilla introduces a new approach to using Java on embedded systems enabling protection, isolation, and security in low-power systems that do not natively support these features. Java provides huge improvements over conventional embedded C approaches thereby enabling developers to build new protocols, new sensor drivers, and new data models quickly and easily.

Visit the conference website