While we’re talking about whether JavaFX is going to replace Swing, maybe we should take a moment to contemplate whether JavaFX is going to replace Java ME. Wait, what? I know, it sounds odd, but that’s sure the impression you’d get from this post on Joshua Marinacci’s blog. Marinacci waxes rhapsodic about the fact that “There is no JavaFX Mobile. There is only JavaFX.” In sum, this means that there isn’t going to be any equivalent of “JavaFX ME” — instead, if you write JavaFX apps to the common profile, they will run as-is on any mobile device that supports JavaFX. (Such support won’t be available to mortals until the JavaFX 1.1 release, but that should be coming soon enough.) And with that ease of development, why, nobody would ever need Java ME ever again, right?Well, not exactly. As Bruce Hopkins makes clear, Java ME is still necessary as the foundation on which any JavaFX program is going to run. But it’s possible to see a day coming when Java ME essentially fades into the background, providing only support services (such as interaction with the device and OS) of the sort that day-to-day programmers won’t have to worry about; particularly if you’re writing GUI-intensive programs, you’ll write them entirely in JavaFX and just assume that they’ll run on any Java ME-enabled device. Of course, this is exactly how Java was supposed to work in the first place, which leaves open the question of what exactly device programmers have been doing tearing their hair out over a dozen fiddly different Java ME profiles over the past decade or so. Software Development