Memo to Sun/Sony/Philips: if you’re talking to developers and you don’t have an SDK, then what’s the damn point?

Seriously, Blu-Ray, you had me at “PlayStation 3″. You don’t have to give me the sell.

In fact, don’t. Not at a tech conference like JavaOne.

Flashback! Last year, I was thwarted in my effort to attend the Blu-Ray disc session at JavaOne, which was a hot topic when it was revealed that all the interactivity in Blu-Ray relies on Java and hence, all Blu-Ray players are J2ME CDC devices. I was determined not to miss it this year, so I used ScheduleBuilder to save myself a spot in the session.

So I went. And what I came away with was an incredibly painful cognitive dissonance about what the reps from Sun and Philips said and what they’re actually doing. See for yourself: the slides are available from the JavaOne Content Catalog Viewer; just look up session id TS-1685.

On the one hand, the speakers differentiated between the two different means of authoring content for Blu-Ray — the HDMV approach speaks to the current DVD workflow of time-line based tools and a very simple interaction models with limited expressiveness. This capability will help Hollywood get discs out faster without having to grow a new skill-set.

However, just higher quality video is probably not enough to get people to migrate to the new standard (if it is enough, HD-DVD is less doomed than I think it is). Blu-Ray knows that radically more compelling content is required to get people to switch. And that will come from developers using the BD-J API’s — Connected Device Configuration (CDC) Java ME sitting atop a number of interactive television API’s (an MHP variant called GEM, some HAVI stuff, etc.) — to create content that can go get new content off the internet, perform elaborate effects, mix sources in realtime, etc. Neat stuff.

And here’s where it makes sense for this to be at a developer conference like JavaOne: they said that “we need you guys to write this stuff”, and said that there would be a market for Java engineers making six-figure salaries developing BD-J discs.

Thing is, right now, the authoring platforms seem to be emerging from existing interactive TV IDE’s that cost five figures. Um, hello, we were interested in making money, not spending it. As user “Keneke” commented yesterday on a previous Blu-Ray blog of mine (perhaps after attending this same session):

I would definitely be interested in more information on BD-J tools and software development. There is almost no public information on BD-J development, which is a pity. If Sony really wants this platform to succeed, they have to open it up to the “little people” like me. I don’t know anyone who can afford to drop $60K on a copy of Scenarist BD Edition and another $40K on the CineForm HD encoder. There must be some way to create BD content without having to get a second mortgage.

Damn straight. Moreover, there was a comment that one of the speakers made about the various existing tools, and how “maybe something open source would emerge”, which contrasted with an acknowledgment that to get started with Blu-Ray development, you really had to join the Blu-Ray Association, which is targeted at membership by industry organizations (companies), and not individuals. Um, so how are open source tools going to emerge from a tightly-controlled, high-cost-of-entry, cozy proprietary little club like this?

I used my question to ask how developers could get a low-level SDK, to start working with BD-J development, and whether those tools would run on Mac and Linux. They said they wasn’t anything available now other than the authoring tools mentioned earlier, and that while some of their work is NetBeans-based, some of the tools for BD-J development are Windows-only.

So this is why I’m pissed. They come to a developer conference, tell us we should all be developing for BD-J, but they don’t have an SDK and point us to authoring tools. They sing and dance about someone developing open source BD-J tools, but there’s no SDK for the open source community to build those tools with (and you know as soon as we even try to hack it, we’ll get slammed with a DMCA suit). And of course, here’s Sun’s Java Media team once again saying that if you want to be a Java Media Developer, you have to be a Windows Developer… JMF never got a Mac version, JavaTV’s emulator only ran on NT4 (I don’t know if it even runs on XP)… I’m sick of it.

If you guys aren’t serious about developers, and if you aren’t serious about cross-platform development, then don’t come back to JavaOne next year. I can get the hard sell from the blue shirts at Best Buy.