It's only taken Borland two years but it's finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland's hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers. Embarcadero Technologies is buying it for about $23 million and the transaction's supposed to close in 30-60 days. Thomas Cressey Bravo the private equity house that bought Embarcadero and took it private last year, is fronting the money.

There were several JavaFX-related announcements and demos at JavaOne, not the least of which is the preview release of the JavaFX SDK due in June 2008. As the interpreted version of JavaFX was the prototype for the compiled version, the javafx.ui classes are the prototype for the javafx.gui classes that were shown at JavaOne and will be released in the SDK. These javafx.gui libraries will have a streamlined, faster performing API, as well as support for multimedia. In June, JavaFX will have turned a significant corner, out of the prototype stage and becoming more mature.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

JavaFX is a scripting language that provides more powerful client applications in term of features for the user interface experience as well as being incorporated with server platform technology such as RMI, Web Services, and EJB. Its ability to reuse all Java libraries opens an opportunity for JavaFX to create flexibility and ease the integration and reuse of existing Java applications.

To wish you Happy Holidays (and if you'll permit me, a very merry Christmas) I wrote this Compiled JavaFX Script Applet (that executes in a browser). For fast deployment I used the latest version of Java SE 6 Update 10 (formerly known as Java SE Update N, formerly known as Consumer JRE, formerly known as Prince.

As I've mentioned before, compiled JavaFX Script is currently under development, and one of the last pieces of the puzzle is the UI features. Currently there are a few UI features that are operational in the compiled version, for example Frame, BorderPanel and Button. Fortunately, the user interface API (widgets and 2D graphics) is almost identical to interpreted JavaFX Script, as is the declarative scripting.

The next JavaFX Puzzler will be posted at 18:00 GMT (1:00PM EST) on Wednesday, November 28, 2007. It will be a compiled JavaFX Script puzzler, so you'll need to build the JavaFX Script Compiler in order to participate in the Puzzler. To help prepare you for the Puzzler, I'd like to you to develop a very basic 'Hello World' style program.

There are several environments in which you can develop and run JavaFX Script programs. I'd like to help you become a JavaFX Script programmer in the next few minutes, so I'm going to show you the fastest route that I know of to get there, which includes using a tool that Sun created called JavaFXPad.

One of the very useful (and cool) features of compiled JavaFX Script will be closures. In a nutshell, JavaFX Script closures provide the ability to define a function within another function with the inner function having access to the local variables of the outer function. This feature is enabled by the fact that in compiled JavaFX Script, functions are first-class objects, which provides the ability to assign functions to variables and to pass functions as arguments to other functions.

I'm at JavaOne this week, where the talk from Sun is all about mobile, or JavaFX and JavaFX Script. I'm not sure the world needs another scripting language, but then what do I know? I know it's a bit off-topic, but the thing that struck me about JavaOne this year is just how busy it is. I didn't hear any numbers yet, but there are a lot of people here. And, more surprisingly to me at least, is that the product pavilion is packed with people. I would have thought that in this day and age, the old trade show formula would be getting old by now, but I guess not. Maybe it's the t-shirts and trade show tchotchkes. But whatever brings them here, I guess people still like to see products close up and personal.

JavaOne opens today and it'll be interesting to hear more about this renewed interest of Sun in Java on the client. While James Gosling and Rich Green have already provided some details on JavaFX

When I was learning how to work with AJAX, I went through a number of 101-type articles. The biggest problem with these tutorials is that the authors are trying to explain several things at once, which is confusing. I'll try to offer you a very simple example of an Ajax application.

Java is a great language for developing enterprise applications. It's powerful, scalable, robust, secure, and typically very complex. As a software developer, I want to solve business problems, not spend man-months building the plumbing for my applications. This article will demonstrate how you can speed up the development and simplify the maintenance of enterprise-class Swing applications by keeping things simple. We'll look at ways to reduce the complexity of your application and the amount of custom code written for it. By limiting the complexity and the amount of plumbing code required, you'll develop more quickly, the application will be easier to maintain, and you can focus on the business logic that provides value to the customer.

Imagine building a house starting with only a pile of timber and a lump of iron, or making a bowl of spaghetti from a sack of wheat and a bag of tomatoes. The importance of having the right materials makes the idea of building products from scratch seem absurd. Similarly, any software project that doesn't take advantage of the numerous frameworks available for any manner of development activity could be wasting valuable resources and ignoring established best practices.