JavaOne 2008 Day 1 - JavaFX, OSGi, and Android Smoke and Mirrors

Posted by Scott Delap on May 07, 2008 09:27 AM

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JavaOne 2008

JavaOne kicked off Tuesday in San Francisco with a keynote largely centered on JavaFX. From the press release the roll out schedule for JavaFX is shaping up as follows:

• July - JavaFX Desktop SDK Early Access
• Fall - JavaFX Desktop 1.0
• Spring 2009 - JavaFX Mobile and JavaFX TV

The keynote also featured demos related HD video which Sun's Bob Brewin announced later in the day will be provided be licensing the On2 codec. Perhaps the most interesting demo was a JavaFX application running on an Android emulator. Android does not support JavaME and Sun has not announced support for Android. Later that morning Sun released a statement clarifying the application demonstration:

...during Rich Green's JavaOne keynote, Sun showed a demo of JavaFX running on the Android emulator that was created by the community. The purpose of this demo was to show the portability of JavaFX to other platforms. This is not a product announcement and Sun has no plans around Android at this time...

OSGi also made an appearance ... albeit in a stealth manner with the keynote disclosure of the new Glassfish micro-kernel being 98k in size. As previously announced the HK2 kernel seems to be have been replaced with OSGi. In a likely related move bloggers are reporting that the "Java 7 Module System (JSR-277) will support both - its own format IAM - as well as OSGi".

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   snooze....

   May 7, 2008 2:02 PM by Tom Nichols

   So... Has anything actually innovative or newsworthy actually come out of JavaOne yet? Not to fault the writer, I think he's doing the best he can with what he's got. Come on... When the iPhone SDK was announced, a beta was available that day. JavaFX is still vaporware, and I have yet to read anything else interesting from that conference. Jeez.

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   Re: snooze....

   May 7, 2008 7:01 PM by Ian Skerrett

   I am attending JavaOne and haven't seen anything interesting. It is pretty sleepy for new announcements. The big announcement was last week by SpringSource. Ian

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   Re: snooze....

   May 8, 2008 12:50 AM by Ben Loud

   Give em a break. Do you think the iPhone was developed overnight? No, developing technology takes time. The difference is other companies keep what they're working on a secret and then make the "big suprise announcement" with a product thats nearly ready to ship. That's great for press releases, but Sun is taking a different approach. They announced their plans early, when they had just begun to develop it, so that they can engage the community as early as possible, develop interest, and encourage the community to help influence it's development through open source projects and feedback. So it's not fair to have a go at them for not having a beta ready yet.

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   Re: snooze....

   May 8, 2008 2:32 PM by Tom Nichols

   While I agree that a big innovative product doesn't happen overnight, the reason they announced early was that they are playing catch-up. Flex (and Silverlight, to a large extent) are already mature technologies. If Sun had released JavaFX last year they would still have been playing catch-up, save for the community that would have instantly jumped on the technology.

   So here we are, a year later, and still nothing concrete. Now Sun is really behind. I'm not saying it's not a good idea... I mean I'll be glad to have it if/when they finally release it... But the longer they take, the more mindshare they lose to other platforms that are at the head of innovation.

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   Re: snooze....

   May 8, 2008 5:49 PM by Michael Neale

   "Flex (and Silverlight, to a large extent) " No - NOT silverlight to any reasonable extent. Not at all. Certainly not compared to flex.

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