WidgetFX @ M3DD Conference
steveonjava | January 22, 2009Through a generous invitation by Sun, I had the opportunity to attend the Mobile, Media & eMbedded Developer Days (M3DD) Conference down in Santa Clara.
There was definitely some very cool stuff going on, most notably the upcoming JavaFX Mobile release. Is it real? Well, here is a screenshot of JavaFX running on a real device:
JavaFX Mobile Running at M3DD
The official release is due out in February, which will include full support for deploying JavaFX applications that use the common profile to mobile devices. The JavaFX Mobile team has been super busy cranking out the last few bits for the upcoming release, but were at the conference in force, armed with a myriad of devices to show the platform capabilities.
Also of note was a cool presentation by Ariel Levin showing mobile widgets deployed to a consumer portal written in LWUIT. Right now their technology is not interoperable with JavaFX Mobile, but they definitely have support of JavaFX widgets in their future roadmap.
Mobile Widgets Written in LWUIT
Although, I have to give it up to Ken Gilmer of Bug Labs for coolest demo. While it is not a mobile phone, the BUG has dozens of modules that allow low level access to motion sensors, cameras, GPSs, and other sensors. Ken also has invented a new demo style called redo programming where he did a fully functional demo with real code exclusively using the undo buffer in Eclipse!
Ken Gilmer Gets the BUG
This was all great motivation to do some more work on deploying WidgetFX widgets to mobile devices. More on this once JavaFX Mobile is released, but look forward to some exciting widget action in your pocket!
Could Sun please get in touch with Apple to get IPhone to support Javafx? They seem destined NOT to support Java.
Java did well to ‘get back in the race’ by directly confronting the adobe and ms behemoths. Open source needs to stick it to these guys at every turn, not only to give us another option but this keeps them on their toes.
For instance, nowadays, ms is really trying to develop standards compliant webpages with expression web. Why? I doubt it’s from the goodness of their hearts, this is because mozilla is forcing them to remain relevant by complying to standards.
I for one, will use OSS whenever possible. Openlaszlo costs a bundle, silverlight too, forget adobe – so I gladly welcome FX. It’s by time java looked at the beauty and visual aesthetics aspect of computing. Linux has had to transform itself in that direction. It is hands-down the better OS, but visually it cant even begin to compete with apple and ms –as a result you cant even give away linux to people who would rather pay for an insecure ‘OS’ like vista or xp. Thats my 2 pence