The Java Store really ought to be one of the biggest bits of Java desktop news since the platform came into existence. At last, a quick and easy way for customers to get Java apps, and for Java developers to connect with customers directly! Sure, it’s following in the footsteps of Apple’s iPhone App Store, but nobody’s actually managed to pull off a desktop version of this yet, so Sun could be as much on the cutting edge as anybody else. Now that the Java Store is in beta, I thought I’d take it out for a spin and see how it works!I downloaded the storefront (itself a JavaFX app; we’ll talk more about JavaFX on Wednesday) to both my Windows and OS X machines. All in all, the experience was relatively painless in both, though Java continues to treat Mac users as second class citizens; the perfectly nice Java Store icon vanishes from the Dock just after launch, only to be replaced by the generic coffee cup icon. Still, once it’s up, it looks … well, like a Java app, which is to say, slick and well designed, but looking something like a foreign body on both Windows and OS X. This is the price of cross-platform functionality.I set up my account with the Java Store on my Windows machine, and the process really crawled — and I don’t just mean at the back end. Just typing in my contact info caused noticeable lag between the key presses and the letters appearing on the screen. My old but trusty IBM ThinkPad is no speed demon, but this certainly didn’t bely any of Java’s reputation as painfully slow. Once I was set up, I decided to buy my first app — and, in the interest of getting the total experience, I did mean buy: I bought the James Gosling-penned Solitaire app that runs for $1.99. (Does Gosling get the money for this?) I dragged it from the store to my desktop, and lo and up popped a screen telling me that I’d have to pay via PayPal. Click an acknowledgment, and my browser automatically opened to PayPal’s site. I log in with my PayPal account address (which is different from the address I used to register with the Java Store; it’s well done that the two don’t have to match), and in a few moments I had paid my $1.99, and got a PayPal receipt with the moderately inscrutable message “Java Store Transaction: txId=630;totalAmount=1.99;taxAmount=0.00;taxAuthority=;fees=0.69;paypalAmount=0.13;productName=Solitaire” attached. I’m of two minds about this process: on the one hand, it was wholly painless; on the other, I was a bit miffed that I had no payment options other than PayPal — I couldn’t even pay through PayPal via credit card without logging in to my account, as is possible with many PayPal Web payment setups. And to be blunt, there were a bit too many opportunities for me to rethink my purchase. One of the geniuses of Apple’s App Store/iTunes mechanism (which is tied directly to a pre-authorized credit card) is that you essentially click once and buy — something that surely increases the number of impulse purchases.Then it was time to wait for my app to download. And wait. And wait! As orange dots swirled over the Solitaire icon in the Store window, I thought, how big could this Solitaire app be? I began to worry that something had gummed up and I had paid two bucks for naught! But eventually the orange dots were replaced by a green checkmark, and a shortcut to the game appeared on my desktop. (The original program was hidden away in the directory “C:Documents and SettingsjfruhApplication DataSunJavaDeploymentcache6.040643ae328-76d73969”, but who can be expected to keep track of where Windows hides things? The app itself worked fine — I’m not sure if that was worth $1.99, the point was to test the process.Next, I repeated the steps on my Mac. I clicked on the Solitaire icon, and was again presented with a PayPal notification dialogue. I sighed and clicked “OK” — and then, in my most unexpectedly pleasant surprise of the day, was told that I had already purchased the app, and could download it again for free! Buy once, own everywhere, as I liked to think about it. I am definitely curious to see if this feature survives into the final version — after all, you could end up with one corporate account (uh, a corporate PayPal account? is there such a thing?) buying a business-y app once and then downloading it onto thousands of corporate desktops. Perhaps there’s an upper limit on the number of downloads? Again, the handling of files worked slightly less smoothly on the Mac; although the “drag the app onto your desktop” metaphor was still in use here, it turned out to be strictly metaphorical, as no desktop shortcut icon appeared, and the app bundle itself was hidden away in my Downloads folder. But the good news was that the app acted like a real first-class Mac app, Dock icon and all, which is proof that it can be done for the Store.Anyway, my conclusion is that Java Store makes it surprisingly easy to buy Java desktop applications, and that the apps currently in the store work in a cross-platform manner. The question is: how can Sun (or Oracle, if the rumors of EU merger approval are correct) get this store in front of users? That will be the rub — and it will be the first test to see if Oracle’s marketeers are better at monetizing Java than Sun’s were. Software Development