Java Industry News

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At Java One this week Sun has been selling its year-old-but-still-upcoming – and definitely late-to-the-party – Adobe AIR- and Microsoft Silverlight-competitive JavaFX Rich Client environment as a potential revenue-generator capable of putting ads on mobile applications and JavaFX Script, its newfangled high-performance GUI declarative scripting language, as the way to build consumer next-generation RIAs for desktops, mobiles, TV and other consumer devices.

Otherwise developers are – preferably – supposed to use the NetBeans IDE to write JavaFX apps, which are supposed to move effortlessly from device to device. FX has its own runtime and media codec framework.

Sun is promising JavaFX Desktop for browsers and PCs this fall and JavaFX TV and the previously announced JavaFX Mobile next spring. It says it’ll have a preview of the JavaFX Desktop SDK this summer.

It’s got demos at www.javafx.com.

Something like 85% of cell phones (like Google’s Android), 91% of desktops, and all Blu-ray disc players are supposed to be able to run JavaFX.

It’s also promising the stuff will be cloud-borne.

Sun says it’s got two projects the other side of JavaFX. One, called Hydrazine, is supposed to let content creators find information and services in the cloud, merge those services together, deploy them in the cloud and share them.

And the other, called Project Insight, is supposed to let developers track how their applications are being used and who’s using them so they can be monetized with advertising. Sun is planning on monetizing that one itself.

When they might arrive is anybody’s guess.