Sun Microsystems brought its own JavaOne conference alive this week by using it as a launching pad to renew its attack on the mobile market, adding a new Java Scripting language Java FX and immediately using it to underpin a whole new application platform for mobile devices, especially targeting handsets.
JavaFX Mobile was described as a complete mobile phone software system available via OEM license to carriers, content owners and consumer electronics manufacturers. JavaFX sits on top of the secure Java platform already on 1.8 billion handsets and is aimed at simplifying the creation and distribution of interactive content across platforms from handsets to set tops to PCs.
JavaFX software will be available to the free and open source community via the GNU General Public License (GPL) license.
You might think that this is an announcement coming five years too late for Sun and you would be right, it’s too late for Sun to make a play to become the operating system of choice for the handset. It’s too late for that even for Microsoft, but as a building block to create user interfaces, which allow handsets to move nimbly between surfing the web, sending e-mail, making calls, watching video and listening to music ‘ in other words for building products like Apple’s iPhone ‘ now that might be worth shooting for.
With the recent acquisition of SavaJe Software who’s technology is the basis of JavaFX, Sun was making it perfectly clear that this announcement is about taking on Nokia’s Series 60, Apple’s iPhone and Qualcomm’s Brew/UIone and the operating system under all of this will be Linux the company said.
Sun says that using SavaJe technologies, JavaFX Mobile will offer a unified runtime environment to drive rich, dynamic content which can be written once for many devices, from set tops to PCs to handsets.
Vodafone was on the Sun podium welcoming the JavaFX range and talking about using it to drive a unified Java solution on mobile devices.
Sun will deliver additional JavaFX products for the manufacturers of set top boxes, navigation devices and automobile dashboards offering an open, secure, unified platform which ‘drives rich interactivity with consumers wherever they are on the Network.’
JavaFX itself is a simple scripting language which can run on mobile phones, or on Blu-ray Disk players or in a browser and should be seen as the first of a series of content authoring products that Sun is lining up. It also said that ‘JavaFX Script is capable of supporting GUIs of any size or complexity and makes it easier to use Swing, one of the best GUI development toolkits of its kind.’
JavaFX Script uses a declarative syntax for specifying GUI components, so a developer’s code closely matches the actual layout of the GUI. JavaFX Script will work with all major IDEs, including NetBeans, which is the reference implementation IDE for Java development.
Sun’s message to operators and handset makers alike was that JavaFX Mobile, because it is built around standard Java APIs, will drive down porting costs and make it quicker to build new rich data applications.
JavaFX Mobile will implement libraries, middleware, and applications in Java and rely on standardized APIs, so porting software to new hardware and adding or replacing software components should be much easier than it would be with proprietary components, and Sun said it would accelerate the development of highly customizable, richly branded and secure user interfaces across mobile feature phone handsets. JavaFX Script applications will run on any JavaSE based platform including those for mobile handsets and TVs.