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After the release of the software development kit for Apple's iPhone, Sun Microsystems says it's going to enable Java applications to run on the device, InfoWorld is reporting.

Sun will build a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), based on the Java Micro Edition version of the programming language after June of this year. It will be available in the iPhone AppStore. Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, told InfoWorld Friday that although Apple passed on enabling Java on the iPhone, Sun decided to do so anyway after Thursday's SDK unveiling. After combing through the documents for the SDK and seeing nothing that barred it from doing so, Sun decided to go for it.

"We're going to make sure that the JVM offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible," Klein said.

Java on the iPhone will mean that versions of software, like customer relationship management and other enterprise applications, could be available on the device.

Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in will be bringing videos and other rich media to Nokia smartphones later this year.

The two companies on Tuesday at Microsoft's Mix '08 conference are scheduled to announce that Microsoft will write a version of Silverlight for Nokia's Series 60 (S60) smartphone software that runs on Symbian OS. The software, which will be available later this year, will also run on Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

For people with compatible devices, it means they will be able to see content, notably video, written for Silverlight, which Microsoft is pushing as an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player. Microsoft has been signing on content partners to use Silverlight for media streaming, including MLB.com and online Olympic games broadcasting with NBC.

For Microsoft, the deal with Nokia is a step in its pledge to make Silverlight "ubiquitous," that is, capable of running on multiple operating systems.

The software giant is trying to lure Web developers toward Silverlight--and away from Flash--to build rich Internet applications or media-oriented Web sites.

The strategy, which Microsoft detailed at last year's Mix conference, hinges on creating tools that let traditional Microsoft developers write Silverlight Web applications with familiar products like Visual Studio and ASP.Net.

Silverlight now runs on Windows and Mac OS, and it has a deal with Novell to build a distribution on Linux.

A version of Silverlight for Windows Mobile will be available later this year, said John Case, a general manager in Microsoft's developer division. "The whole Silverlight strategy is to provide one programming model and ubiquity," he said.

Microsoft chose to work with Nokia because it has the largest market share of mobile phones, but it will sign on with other handset makers to create ports of Silverlight, Case said.

All the main features of Silverlight, including video and interactive Web application development, will be included in all mobile versions.

But there will be some device-specific restraints, which means Microsoft will create editions of Silverlight for different mobile platforms, he said.

Microsoft is working on a new development language, called 'D,' which will make it easier to model applications, Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet reports.

Her post describes D as a "declarative language aimed at non-developers."

Modeling and end-user programming are big themes in Microsoft's development tools work.

By creating models of applications, developers can speed up their development time and make it easier to deploy and operate those applications once they are live.

End-user programming, a long-held idea, is getting more realistic in the days of mashups where people combine data from different Web feeds onto a single Web page.

Last year, Microsoft's developer group released Popfly which is a mash-up builder. It's a visual application creation tool, but it's also meant to introduce basic concepts of programming.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Charles Simonyi--legendary Microsoft programmer, good friend of Martha Stewart and space tourist--doesn't have many good things to say about the current state of his own profession, software engineering.

He says businesses are stuck in a "poverty economy," using only the cheap and crude tools available to write programs. And he calls software development "the bottleneck on the high-tech horn of plenty."

Simonyi spoke at EmTech, the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here Wednesday, where he described his solution to the programming problem.

Professionally, Simonyi is well-known for his role in heading up Microsoft's PC applications in group in the 1980s. He is also known for his personal relationship with Martha Stewart and the trip he took to space earlier this year.

Five years ago, he founded Intentional Software which has created technology that seeks to speed up software programming and thus help solve business problems.

Traditional software development is hampered by communication barriers. Businesspeople who are "domain experts" in how their companies operate tell technical people--programmers--what they need software to do to solve their business problems.

This transfer of requirements from businesspeople to programmers is problematic because the parties speak different languages and companies' needs change.

Intentional's technology is designed to enable businesspeople to express their requirements in a way that doesn't demand that they learn computer languages. It is also designed to help software engineers generate code based on businesspeople's requirement descriptions.

"Businesspeople lack the means of expressing themselves. Our proposition is to fully integrate domain experts into software development," Simonyi said.

During his talk, Simonyi said existing technologies for modeling business applications or domain-specific languages--used by software development powerhouses like his former employer, Microsoft, and IBM--are not complete or flexible enough.

"The reason (Intentional's software) will work is because the applicability is vastly greater," he said.

People can continue to use those technologies from more established providers. They can stay on the "edge of the renaissance and not enter the Industrial Age."

"I want to take the bigger step, and I think it's important for someone to make the investment in the technology," he said.

During his talk, Simonyi described a positive experience of an Intentional Software customer, consulting firm Capgemini's financial-services group in the Netherlands.

Previous programming techniques resulted in an expensive and brittle process, he said. The Intentional software enabled the Capgemini team to reduce the number of handoffs between different parties in the application development process.

"This system is equally applicable in other domains," he said.

It seems only fair that since the hardware side of the computing world plowed ahead with parallelized computing, they should help out the software development community.

In that spirit, AMD plans to let developers take a crack at its Light-Weight Profiler Tuesday as a possible assist for the growing problem faced by PC software developers: just how the hell are we going to effectively use processors with multiple cores? AMD's LWP could let applications written for runtime environments like Java or .Net interact directly with hardware to know how much performance is available across a series of cores, said Earl Stahl, vice president of software alliances for AMD.

Much has been written about the need for the PC software development community to move past the "free lunch" era, when it could write a single-threaded application and watch its performance improve over time as a processor's clock speed got faster and faster. That ended with the overheating concerns presented by fast single-core chips. Parallel programming is nothing new to the server world, but it's a new path for PC software developers and new techniques are needed to make sure client applications will show improved performance as the number of cores on a chip increases at a faster rate than the actual clock speed of that chip.

LWP is designed to help developers boost the performance of applications created for runtime environments like Java or .NET, such as Web-based applications. Right now, those applications don't talk directly to the processor to see how much performance they've got in the pipeline; they have to go through the operating system. LWP will let that application code see exactly what resources are available, allowing the code to avoid overloaded cache memory in one core, for example, and avoid the performance penalty caused by asking the operating system to query every core.

Right now, this isn't an immediate problem. As we move forward with quad-core chips and eventually to eight cores or more, however, applications will need to know how to allocate themselves across those idle cores, Stahl said. AMD hopes LWP will help a new generation of application development tools make those decisions.

Interested developers can check out the specification on AMD's site, Stahl said. The company's holding the equivalent of a public comment period during which developers can submit feedback for a final specification that could be incorporated into future AMD processors as an extension to the x86 instruction set, such as AMD's 64-bit AMD64 instructions or Intel's SSE multimedia instructions. Eight-core PC chips won't be very common until around the end of this decade at the earliest, giving the industry some time to tackle the problem.