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What Is It?
Another JavaOne General session today and my complacency is driven away by the excitement in the air; something big is going to happen.
Rich Green had presented the Java numbers for the year: downloads, developers, etc. early in the keynote presentation. Everything is ticking upwards as it should but something stood out in that comparative sense. While there are millions of desktops, there are billions of mobile devices. This isn't really news; but coupled with Jonathan's statement about "volume drives value" and the acquisition of SavaJe intellectual property by Sun, you knew this was going somewhere important, something was about to happen. Maybe it was just hopeful, maybe it was one of those Blink-moments described by Malcolm Gladwell, but something was going to happen.
If You Want to Build a Community, Examine How People Connect
Walking from Union Square to the Moscone Center on Monday, I noticed the proliferation of laptops, tucked safely away in backpacks on-route to their next assignment. Laptops, the new desktop, big displays, Gigs of memory and enough disk space for hours of movies and music, years of email and a life's worth of pictures, add to all that wired and wireless connectivity. At the same time, for every backpack there were at least 3x the number of mobile phones visible. And obviously with 3x the number of mobile phones, they were not just used by the laptop/backpack/geek-at-a-conference crowd. Moms with strollers, people making their way to work, bike messengers and even the 4 police officers on break at Starbucks, all actively engaged in using their mobile devices: talking, taking photos, texting and listening to music. The mobile device cuts across all demographics.
To Connect People, Use the Most Ubiquitous Platform and Provide the Most Compelling Experience
The ubiquitous mobile platform is the Java ME platform, period. There are 2.1 billion enabled Java handsets, and another 976 million will be sold by the end of this year (2007). What's missing is the compelling experience. To date, manufacturers have provided browsers for handsets, originally WAP or cHTML, and more recently HTML. At the same time, desktop browsers have progressed to include a large selection of plug-ins, XHTML, JavaScript, and of course Ajax.
At Monday's CommunityOne event Tim O'Reilly made a few very important observations regarding the most popular applications in use today. They are: 1) Internet based, 2) content is user provided or generated and 3) the more content, the more value. Somewhat counter intuitive to all this value is the fact that these applications are relatively simple when compared to traditional desktop applications. Think YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and craigslist.
JavaFX
JavaFX is the name of a family of products that will deliver the compelling user experience on a large cross-section of platforms, including mobile phones, home entertainment devices, desktop and JavaFX Mobile (more on this last one later).
JavaFX will enable the compelling user experience, including Rich Internet Applications (RIA). It will do this by greatly simplifying the creation of graphic content. For example, graphic content that presently requires a page of Java source built from in-depth understanding of Swing can be implemented in a few lines of JavaFX Script. Effects such as animation, scaling, translation, and transparency, all available with a few simple, declarative statements.
Creative content providers are not Java programmers, they are right-side artistic types, but with JavaFX Script they will be Java developers, they just won't know it. While the pioneers will use F3 Pad, there are huge opportunities to deliver tools to further simplify JavaFX Script generation by the creative community. For example, in the very early days of Java the IDE consisted of text editor and javac used from within a terminal. These days NetBeans is the IDE, few, if any would use vi and javac. For the ambitious, ask those that excel at content creation what they do, listen to what they say about the creative process and write them the development tools to support it. You'll be doing the Java community a huge favor.
Enter JavaFX Mobile
What's missing from the mobile platform is the compelling experience. If there is one thing that the announcement and rampant hype and speculation of the Apple iPhone has demonstrated , it is the value of software. The iPhone has few, if any, features not available on existing high-end and less expensive mobile devices. What the iPhone does promise is the compelling user experience.
JavaFX Mobile is the name given to a complete software stack for a new generation of mobile device. At its core the device uses an embedded Linux kernel. The kernel is complemented by a complete set of frameworks covering multi-media, graphics, communications, personal information management, file system access and telephony. All of the frameworks, including telephony, are accessible as Java APIs and only Java APIs. In addition to all these frameworks, an adaptation of JavaFX is included to allow the creation of RIA scaled to the mobile device.
Where Did It Come From?
JavaFX has been hiding in plain sight since November 2006, the date of Chris Oliver's first blog entry for his project called "F3". All of this is moot because by now, everyone has Google'd "Chris Oliver" and discovered it for themselves. As of Tuesday noon Chris's blog is the top Google hit for "Chris Oliver". The page reports over 3400 page hits alone and it's still early in the day.
What's the Effect?
JavaFX Mobile will lower cost of mobile devices by providing a common software stack. The lower cost means wider access. Wider access means a larger community of users and developers. A larger community means more opportunity for everyone, which means lower costs and a larger community. Now I'm being repetitive, but you get the idea. We're back to Jonathan's statement, "volume drives value".
What Next?
Right now, there is the JavaFX website, bookmark it. At the same time you might want to also bookmark Chris Oliver's blog, but I suspect Chris is going to be really busy in the coming months.
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