One of the many ways that JavaFX was supposed to change the world of Java forever: it was supposed to supply a unifying method for creating slick mobile UIs with Java. That’s been one of the technology’s less fulfilled promises (does anyone know of any mobile JavaFX apps out there in the wild?). Instead, Java mobile development in practice remains spread out over various quasi-compatible silos. That didn’t get any better at this week’s CES, when AT&T announced that Qualcomm’s Brew platform would be the foundation of the company’s feature phones. “Feature phone” is the industry term for those phones not quite at the level of an iPhone or Android device, but still with some computing power — and that’s a market where Java ME’s best hopes lie. You can write Java code for the some versions of the BREW platform — including, apparently, the version that AT&T will be using — but doing so comes with the usual sets of wrinkles and requirements involve in writing for a specialized platform.It’s gotten to the point that at least some Java developers are seeing Android as the great hope for mobile Java development. Android is mobile, of course, and it is Java, sort of, in the sense that you can write Java code for Android, but it’s its own specialized Java dialect, which entails both a learning curve for developers and work to port code written for other devices.It seems that in the mobile realm, the “write once, run anywhere” promise is really down to its lowest common denominator: learn to write one kind of code, run code like that anywhere, with a bit of specialized learning for each platform. It doesn’t appear likely that we’ll be seeing apps written for one gadget running effortlessly on others anytime soon. Technology Industry