Great news coming from Santa Clara, CA, as Sun Microsystems announced the release of JavaFX Preview SDK (Software Development Kit). Sun Microsystems caused quite a stir in the RIA community when it presented, earlier this year, at the JavaOne Conference, the JavaFX concept platform aimed at competing with Adobe's AIR/Flex or Microsoft's Silverlight, promising cross-screen application development.

JavaFX is a family of products that features a runtime and tools that developers can use to create a wide array of Rich Internet Applications for the web, desktop, mobile devices and other platforms. The core concept is that applications developed using JavaFX will run on any device supporting the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This includes the vast majority of desktops and mobile devices, as well as a big percentage of TV STBs and Blu-ray DVD players. In this respect, Ken Wallich, VP of JavaFX at Sun, noted that "only the Java platform is pervasive enough to allow developers to build and deploy RIAs across desktops and browsers on more than 800 million PCs, as well as billions of mobile phones and devices."

The JavaFX Preview SDK allows developers who want to get a head start to familiarize themselves with the documentation and to begin writing applications that work both in browsers and desktops, which makes this release mainly aimed at web scripters. For now, it features the compiler and runtime tools, graphics and media libraries for the desktop and browser platforms, a plug-in for NetBeans and the Project Nile suite, but Sun hopes to have a complete version of this technology by the end of the year.

Whether JavaFX will be able to take on Adobe in the RIA game only time will tell. However, some professionals are already skeptical about it, noting things like Java's lack of performance when compared with Flash, and the fact that JavaFX does not represent a new runtime, but is instead built on the same slow JRE that simply isn't capable of such interaction. To that, they also add the fact that Adobe's Flex and Microsoft's Silverlight have already been available for a while now.

Even so, Sun hopes to catch up from behind due to its big developer base. As Param Singh, Senior Director of Java Marketing, points out, there are already over 6 million Java developers in the world who will take advantage of this new technology. In other words, Sun is taking on a different approach in promoting JavaFX, by starting with the developers and moving upwards to the designers, while Adobe focused its strategy on designers and then moved in the other direction.