As I noted in my last post, the vision of what, exactly, Java was for when it was birthed in the mid ’90s hasn’t exactly synched up with its use in practice. The fact that Java ended up powering so many server-side apps, not the client applets that Sun imagined would be its natural market, can be chalked up to some combination of the language’s natural flexibility and dumb luck. So, it’s fair to ask similar questions about the embryonic JavaFX. In a recent InfoWorld article on JavaFX, Andres Almiray says that he expect JavaFX to do well in the mobile arena, but that going up against Flex in the RIA space — the space that JavaFX has ostensibly been designed for — will be a tougher job. On Almiray’s own blog, he goes into a bit more detail: Lastly I really don’t expect JavaFX to succeed in the mobile space unless Sun concentrates its efforts on that space. Touting JavaFX as a RIA Platform while at the same time aiming for the mobile arena will be an uphill climb, a very steep one. Simply put, there are 3 known profiles in JavaFx: common, desktop and mobile. The mobile one is actually the one driving development of the other two, as it is the most restricted one (Swing can’t run on it for starters), which is why many already existing Swing components must be rewritten/ported to the common/mobile profiles. Sun never quite gave up on client-side Java, but it did dedicate considerable resources to getting it on the server. It will be interesting to see if the marketing energy goes into mobile if that turns out to be the most promising direction for JavaFX. (In other JavaFX news of note, the InfoWorld test center put out a tech preview a few weeks ago that may be of interest.) Software Development