No, this isn’t another post about JavaFX (though, for those who are interested, version 1.0 of the JavaFX SDK is coming soon, hooray!). I’m talking about Java itself — real, live, Java SE. After all, wasn’t the initial promise of Java: that it would essentially allow the development of what we now call rich Internet applications? I actually remember my first interaction with Java, in 1997 or thereabouts; my roommate and I somehow found, via our dialup connection, a Java-based in-browser word processor. “Why on Earth would anyone want to do this?” we asked, after the two or three minutes it took to load. (Fortunately, nobody on the future Google Docs team was there to be dissuaded.)Anyway, while one Sun team works feverishly on JavaFX, another has been polishing up standard Java and the Java plug-in to maybe revive the idea of Java itself as an Internet app platform. The latest 6u10 release, which is supposed to improve the plug-in, also provides browser-based support for non-Java JVM languages — Scala, Groovy, the JVM flavors of Python and Ruby, you name it.One person who should be very interested in such developments is Marvin Warble, who posted a long piece on Javalobby about his project, the Galileo RIA framework — which is based on Java. It’s an interesting discussion of why he went to the trouble — mostly because he found Java so much easier to program in than the usual RIA suspects. This is exactly the sort of thing that Sun has always dreamed of being true for the Java ecosystem, and who knows? Maybe Java will find its home on the Web at last. Software Development