Sun Microsystems announced that full support for Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) - the next generation Java platform for mobile phones - is now available across its mobile product line and the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment.

Sun, along with 13 other companies, participated in the development of MSA through the Java Community Process. The goal of MSA is to provide greater handset platform functionality to application developers and reduce implementation variation through the creation of standard Application Programming Interfaces. The new capabilities of MSA allow for the creation of compelling mobile applications and services, including 3D graphics, information management, bluetooth, animation, web services, location services and payment services.

"Java technology provides the ubiquitous platform that enables mobile applications to be created and deployed across multiple devices. Building on the more than 1.5 billion Java technology-enabled phones in the market today, MSA will move the mobile industry forward by exposing advanced capabilities for developers to create cool, new applications and services for the next-generation of mobile phones," said Laurie Tolson, vice president of Client Software Group at Sun. "In addition, MSA helps to drive consistency in implementations of the specification, which will reduce industry fragmentation. Sun is pleased to support this new specification throughout our mobile product offerings."

Sun products supporting MSA include Sun Java Wireless Client, Sun Java Device Test Suite 2.0, NetBeans Mobility Pack 5.5, Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5 for Connected Limited Device Configuration. In addition to these commercial products, SUN also makes available the source code for Sun's advanced phone and feature phone Java ME implementations, as part of the phoneME project in the Mobile & Embedded community on Java.net. Sun has released these technologies under an open source license in order to accelerate the development and evolution of the platform, reduce fragmentation and drive down development costs throughout the Java ME ecosystem.

More information about MSA can be found here.