In what seemed to be surprise to some of us Sun released JavaFX 1.1, which includes JavaFX Mobile. Long expected, much awaited, Java makes a come-back on mobile devices with “JavaFX to-go”. JavaFX 1.1 can be dowloaded here, and some more information (videos, tutorials) are available on this page. As expected, the company announced a number of global partners for JavaFX Mobil. Here are some comments from the JavaFX Mobile partners:
LG Electronics
“Sun and LG Electronics have a strong working relationship around Java technology for our product line. We look forward to being the first company to deliver a JavaFX enabled handset so we can build new and exciting features that benefit our customers.”Sony Ericsson
“Sony Ericsson is committed to delivering innovative and energized user experiences to our consumers, working closely with partners who share the creativeness and vision. We see JavaFX as a natural fit to our mobile software platform strategy to enable developers, both in-house and in our ecosystem, to create superior, innovative, expressive mobile applications and services. Sony Ericsson expects that JavaFX will have a great impact on the mobile content ecosystem and plan to bring JavaFX to a significant part of our product portfolio.”
JavaFX Mobile is a milestone for the RIA industry. The single most distributed RIA runtime environment on mobile devices and embedded systems has been Java – and I don’t consider JavaScript in the mobile browser an alternative until 2009/2010. Sun counts a total of more than 6.5 million developers world-wide using Java for development, and if only 5% of those developers are interested in the JavaFX UI development approach it’s already a sufficient number of developers to drive the technology into the market.
Netbeans IDE already has good support for JavaFX, tool support is guaranteed. Sun has to find a solution for the browser integration problems and the pop-ups you see on most Java installations right now when launching a JavaFX application. For mobile devices it’s a different situation, since more and more consumers are used to installing applications on their phones instead of just browsing web pages. Apple and the iPhone with App-Store have been trendsetters for native applications on mobile phones, utilizing a specific phone SDK. JavaFX Mobile’s advantage is clearly the fact that applications created with the SDK will not only run on devices manufactured by one vendor. As a fan of Sun’s open source products (Java, Tomcat, Glassfish, Netbeans, Mysql, …) I’m glad that the company shows the commitment to the JavaFX technology.
