Amazon has unveiled the details of its development kit for its Kindle e-book reader.
The so called “Kindle development kit for active content” (or KDK) will be based on Java 1.4 Personal Basis Profile (JSR 217); custom additional APIs will be available for networking, local storage, specific UI components, etc. (see javadoc).
As strongly as I feel about not actually owning what’s on your Kindle, this comes as a good news for Java when its future is being questioned after the Oracle merger.
You can read the KDK FAQ there.
Wow, JDK1.4. What can I say? 🙂
Personal Basis Profile is a Java ME CDC profile, which is based on Java SE 1.4.2. Currently (afaik) no Java ME profile is based on Java 5 or 6…
The question is, why choose Java ME? Can’t the Kindle support a full Java SE runtime?