Josh Fruhlinger
Contributing Writer

Oracle’s Java road show continues

how-to
Mar 25, 20102 mins

Oracle is sending its mid-to-upper-level folks out on a charm offensive to convince Java developers of their good intentions. Last week it was James Gosling at The ServerSide’s confab; this week, at EclipseCon, a pair of VPs, Steve Harris and former Sunnie Jeet Kaul, were touting Oracle’s various commitments to the platform. Much of their focus was on modularity via OSGi, a technology that’s already pretty near and dear to Eclipse users. Kaul also offered assurances that “I’m sure there is going to be” a Java EE 7 release at some point, which is a sort of non-reassuring reassurance — did anyone really expect there not to be? Was it necessary to even bring this up? JDK 7 was also mentioned as coming soon, also chock-full of modular goodness.

One technology that was also touted if briefly as the recipient of serious Oracle love and attention was JavaFX. This is interesting given the venue at EclipseCon: last I had checked in, NetBeans was still the only IDE with full-on JavaFX support, which was one of the main arguments as to why Oracle wouldn’t let that IDE slip into the post-merger darkness just yet. There’s now instructions for working with JavaFX and Eclipse on JavaFX.net, last updated in January; I’m guessing the JavaFX plug-in linked to is the community-maintained one that was on Project Kenai up until recently. Anybody know if it’s as fully featured as JavaFX’s support in NetBeans yet?