JavaFX: A Bright Future on Open Source-Based Mobile Devices?
by Sam Dean - May. 06, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Sun Microsystems is out with an answer to Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight Rich Internet Application tools: JavaFX. At the JavaOne show in San Francisco today, Sun's head of software, Rich Green, discussed what to expect from the new offering. Green claims JavaFX will arrive on 91 percent of desktops, 85 percent of cell phones, and 100 percent of Blu-ray players--no small claims. While I'm not positive it will have that bright a future on so many platforms, Green showed JavaFX running on Google's Android mobile platform, which is Linux-based. Here, there could be promise.
JavaFX is, in Sun's eyes at least, designed to usher in Rich Internet Applications such as rendering multiple high-definition movies concurrently, and rendering and tagging many photos at once. It includes a scripting language called JavaFX Script. It's also positioned as a write-once, deliver-to-many-platforms environment, so that developers might produce an application to a Web browser, an operating system and a mobile phone at once.
Java's installed base is what Sun has its eyes on there. According to Sun, Java is on:
- 20 million Java powered TV devices
- 800M+ Java desktop computers, 91% of worldwide desktops
- 2.1B Java enabled mobile devices
- 3.5B Java cards
- 6B total Java devices
- 7M+ Project GlassFish downloads
Here also is a graphic showing how JavaFX co-exists with devices and applications:
It's on new breed mobile phones and devices, running open source software, that I think JavaFX might have a bright future. I've written before about how Linux may arrive on 20 percent of cell phones by 2010--a prediction originally made by ABI Research.
Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress conference, there were more than 20 new mobile phones based on Linux announced, most of them using the LiMo platform. LiMo is seen as much better performing and more flexible than previous Linux phone platforms. Google's Android solution is also stoking the fire, and promises to bring much open source technology to mobile handsets. Finally, Mozilla's Fennec mobile browser is targeted to run on a lot of the new Linux-based phones, including Android phones.
With so many applications on our desktops dependent on Java, and our browsing and content consumption habits tied to Java, it seems natural that JavaFX could create a bridge to applications for mobile devices. If we do see an influx of phones based on Linux, and a browser like Fennec reproduces the browser behavior we're used to with applications such as Firefox, then it would be good to see free Rich Internet Application software layers like JavaFX bring rich media to those new, open source mobile devices.
