Interesting development – Fujitsu announced recently that they will be offering a service to deploy Android onto all different types of hardware.
This potentially opens up interesting opportunities for smart software on a whole range of devices, not just mobile handsets. As Jetty is already running on Android, we could see Jetty on all kinds of devices! Of course, Jetty has already been ported to run under J2ME-based devices in the past, but Android provides a more familiar development environment for users accustomed to J2SE. With Jetty onboard, devices could be dynamically updated with new functionality over HTTP simply by downloading a new war file (well, a war file with classes compiled for the Android dalvik vm of course).
The Jetty-on-Android project – called i-jetty – already provides this dynamic download feature, along with a couple of webapps as demonstrations.
Although, to make this really fly, Google would need to make some modifications to their classloading security mechanism to really support servlet-style classloader hierarchies. This feature has been requested many times on the android groups, such as here and here. Lets hope this feature moves up the priority list soon!