At Sun's annual JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco Tuesday, they released new open-source testing tools and said they were enhancing the five-year-old program used to certify Java ME programs on mobile devices. The goal: to simplify the process and reduce the number of tests that software developers have to run in order to be sure that their programs will run properly on different phones.

"Nobody likes testing," said Martin Wrigley, director of technology with Orange's partner program, at a press conference. As the market for mobile applications matures, developers will do more of the testing themselves, he said.

The problem is that different network operators have different requirements and sell different devices, so any software developer who wants to reach a large audience has to do a lot of testing. And that can be expensive. A single test can cost US$200, and while that may not sound like a lot, it can add up quickly. Wrigley knows of one applications developer who maintains 14,000 versions of his product. With the new testing methodology "we have seen reductions in up to 50 percent in the costs of testing," he said.

Sun has been pushing Java on mobile phones for about a decade now, but in recent years the platform has been overshadowed by the iPhone and Google's Android.

The most popular applications on Orange's network are very simple Java apps like and , but there's no reason why Java couldn't be used to create the same kind of applications that are being downloaded from Apple's App Store, Wrigley said.