Oh, hey, it looks like Sun’s RIA contender, JavaFX, is finally here, for real, in non-beta form! Sun’s bloggers have been all over this today, more so than over anything else in all the time I’ve put all of them in my feed reader. I’d love to let Sun bask in its glory today, but my contrarian side forces me to note that there seems to be a little thread of anxiety among those posting comments on some of Sun’s own blogs. Such as: “Has it really been tested at all? I get all kinds of JavaScript error on the site also. Very disappointing.” And: “J Marinacci is the embodiment of what is wrong with Sun: brilliant technologies at the hands of people that wreck them. Today’s failure of the launch is abysmal and unacceptable.” I think the latter is a reference to the site hiccups JavaFX.com experienced today, presumably due to server load. (A problem, to be sure, but a kind of good problem to have.)The technology is available for Windows and OS X — though on my own Macbook, with the OS, the browsers, and Java fully up to date, I couldn’t coax any of the in-browser sample apps to work in either Firefox or Safari. The Java Web Start apps ran great and looked really slick; perhaps it is churlish of me to note that they did leave .jnlp files littered across my desktop.At least my computer can run the apps, though; Linux and Solaris aren’t supported, though such support is being actively worked on. Truth be told, OS X and Windows obviously represent the huge majority of systems Sun will be trying to reach as end users; still, there’s enough developers out there who use Linux that perhaps Josh Marinacci shouldn’t have mocked their complaints with l33tsp3ak. It is, after all, developers that Sun are trying to capture — developers that already have invested in Java skills, and might be willing to try out JavaFX for rich Internet apps instead of learning a whole new set of tools for Flash or Silverlight. JavaFX is also a big part of Sun’s mobile strategy, with JavaFX Mobile now available as beta, with 1.0 to come in February. JavaFX Mobile is necessary because essentially mobile handsets have completely shattered Java ME’s write once, run anywhere promise, with a baffling array of different Java profiles across different handsets. JavaFX is supposed to paper over the differences — but AT&T has already announced that it will be dropping Java from its branded handsets, focusing on Symbian instead.For more JavaWorld JavaFX coverage, check out the first and second parts of Jeff Friesen’s Jump into JavaFX series; listen to the Unwrapping JavaFX 1.0 podcast; and read Chris Oliver’s blog. Software Development