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Sun Microsystems plans to launch JavaFX Mobile on Thursday, the second of a three-stage debut of technology it hopes will ease software design while modernizing its Java technology

JavaFX Mobile is a software layer that handles user interface elements such as graphics and animations on mobile phones. It's closely related to the JavaFX for desktops and laptops introduced in December and the JavaFX version for TVs that's still not released.

Sun's Param Singh discusses JavaFX Mobile.

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

Sun is also announcing a few partners it's lined up to endorse the technology: mobile phone makers Sony Ericsson and LG Electronics, mobile phone network operators Sprint and Orange, and software providers Cynergy and MobiTV. Param Singh, senior director of Java marketing at Sun, projects that JavaFX could ship in phones in late 2009 but certainly in 2010.

With JavaFX, Sun wants to make it easier to create Java programs with slick user interfaces. When the technology arrives, phone users will "see applications that look great, that are very expressive, but that also are very functional," Singh predicted.

With Java, Sun put Microsoft on the defensive and won over millions of programmers. But the technology now faces innumerable competitors--Microsoft's similar .Net technology among them--and plenty of other high-profiles challenges.

In the mobile area, Apple's iPhone doesn't support Java at all. Adobe is working on a version of Flash 10 for mobile phones. And Google's Android operating system uses a version of Java that strays from the official industry fold, called the Java Community Process. Nokia's got its Symbian operating system, too, and Palm is trying again with its own.

But Sun has more than a foothold. Java has had a decade to get established on mobile phones, and despite problems such as the fragmentation that means a given Java program won't necessarily run on a given Java handset, it's widely available. Sun estimates it's available on 2.6 billion phones.

Sun is aiming JavaFX at a broader market than the smartphone arena where much of the action is happening--basically, the "feature phones" that are a notch above the voice-only models at the bottom of the pecking order.

"We see growth in the feature-phone segment in emerging market. The growth in the U.S. and Silicon Valley is in the high-end smartphones that everyone carries, but that's not the majority of the world," Singh said.

JavaFX handles a number of chores for creating mobile phone applications, but it doesn't do everything. Sun also plans to announce that JavaFX Mobile can work hand-in-hand with its earlier Java Micro Edition technology when it's time to tap directly into mobile phone subsystems such as its Bluetooth communication technology, its camera, or its GPS location system.

Sun also is announcing that the JavaFX software development kit will include an emulator to test JavaFX Mobile software even without a JavaFX Mobile device.

With a back-to-the-future technology called JavaFX to be launched Thursday, Sun Microsystems hopes to attract a new class of developer while building a much-needed new revenue source.

JavaFX 1.0 returns to the sales pitch that Sun used during Java's launch more than 13 years ago: a foundation for software on a wide variety of computing "clients" such as desktop computers or mobile phones. JavaFX builds on current Java technology but adds two major pieces.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

First is a new software foundation designed to run so-called rich Internet applications--network-enabled programs with lush user interfaces. Second is a new programming language called JavaFX Script that's intended to be easier to use than traditional Java.

But JavaFX faces some steep challenges. Chief among them: while Sun spent much of its energy adapting Java for servers, a host of other software options for building rich Internet applications sprang up. Java paved the way in 1995, but now it's got to take on Adobe Systems' Flash and AIR, Microsoft's newer arrival, Silverlight, and JavaScript and its more sophisticated cousin Ajax.

"This is the essence of the Hail Mary," said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. "I would like to think there's a role for Java on the client, but it's very late."

But Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, despite Sun's dropping revenue, low stock price, and large new layoff, believes that JavaFX will overcome its obstacles.

"Don't confuse relevance for stock price," he said, pointing to Java's widespread adoption among developers and students, and to Sun's expansion into newer open-source areas such as the MySQL database software. "We're more relevant today than any other software developer on the face of the Earth."

And while JavaFX may not be widely discussed today as a rich Internet application foundation, "I promise you that will change in the next 60 to 90 days," Schwartz said.

Java's stronghold
With help from allies such as IBM, Sun built Java into a powerful technology for server software tasks such as running stock-trading applications. And it gained a stronghold on millions of mobile phones.

But it missed out on desktop computers, where it was notoriously slow to load, and lost out chiefly to JavaScript built into the browser and to Adobe's Flash plug-in. On mobile phones, Java has suffered from a sprawling set of optional features that undermine its "write once, run anywhere" promise to developers. Different phones essentially have different varieties of Java.

JavaFX is designed to address both of those issues. First, a more unified "runtime" foundation spans PCs and mobile phones, though the latter version isn't expected until the first half of 2009. And this time, Sun supplies it in an unmodified form so phone manufacturers won't splinter it into incompatible versions.

Sun is promoting JavaFX as a good way to write rich Internet applications. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

"We're making our binaries available" to mobile-phone makers "so we can unify the Java platform implementations," said Schwartz, who expects rapid adoption. "We're starting with a couple billion handsets in the marketplace and swimming downstream."

The business case
Sun also will charge those handset makers a per-unit royalty for JavaFX, and right now, Sun needs all the revenue it can get. Although Java has been good for Sun's brand, it hasn't been a cash cow, but here again, Schwartz has high expectations.

"Java has become the single most profitable software product at Sun, growing more rapidly than any other," he said, pointing to billings (PDF) that Sun charged customers in the company's most recent quarter.

In raw revenue, though, its 18 percent growth to $34 million lagged that of MySQL, for which billings grew 50 percent annually to $37 million. And Sun's hardware revenue still is an order of magnitude larger than its software revenue.

Schwartz also believes that JavaFX has more appeal to content providers because it comes from a neutral technology supplier, not a potential rival.

"The problem with browsers, when viewed as the default mechanism for delivering content for the Web, is that browsers have become hostile territory," Schwartz argued. "Internet Explorer is owned by Microsoft. Firefox is owned by Google, at this point. Chrome is owned by Google. Beyond that, with maybe (the exception) of Safari, which is owned by Apple, there is no safe route to distribute your content into the marketplace."

Perhaps JavaFX's open-source nature reduces the threat that Sun could hold a business partner hostage. But when it comes to safety, there also are risks to betting on new technology.

Distributing JavaFX is another challenge. The auto-update feature in desktop Java will take care of PCs, starting next year--though people will be able to actively download it sooner in coming days--but for mobile phones, Sun relies on handset makers and electronics companies such as TV makers to build it in.

EZ coding
JavaFX is designed to be easier to use too. The JavaFX Script origins lie in a project originally called F3, short for the "form follows function" slogan from the Bauhaus school of architectural thought.

"You can use Java to solve difficult problems," but doing so often requires sophisticated programming, said Eric Klein, Sun's vice president of Java marketing. And regular Java isn't well-adapted to creating basic, media-rich applications that run in browsers. Building a simple media player application in Java takes 100 lines of code, but JavaFX Script can do it in 20 or 30 lines, he said.

"The goal was to make (the) power of Java accessible to an entirely new class of developers," Klein said. "For existing developers, it would accelerate how fast they could get things done."

JavaFX also comes with a slick feature, the ability to move running applications out of the browser and onto the desktop--and back, if desired. Essentially, they can change their nature and abilities according to where they're housed. And the same application also can run on JavaFX Mobile, holding the promise for programmers that they won't have to endlessly rewrite the same applications for different media.

"You can build a media player, run it in a browser, then you can simply drag it out of your browser onto your desktop, and it becomes a desktop application automatically. It's the same code, the same application," said Jeet Kaul, Sun's senior vice president of Java engineering.

Moving to the desktop, the application could take advantage of new screen real estate that affords a better user interface and new permissions for tasks such as writing files to a hard drive, Kaul said.

Again, though, incumbent players have an edge. JavaScript has matured as an interface language, Flash has many loyal developer fans, and Silverlight is powerful, Eunice said.

"I'm invariably skeptical that a language you don't know yet is going to be easier than all the languages you do know," Eunice said. And unlike with earlier chapters of the Java saga, "Sun has to do all this heavy lifting on its own."

Sun Microsystems on Thursday released a preview version of JavaFX, programming technology the company hopes will be the foundation of splashy, whiz-bang Internet applications.

Sun is promoting JavaFX as a good way to write rich Internet applications. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

JavaFX, like its Java progenitor, includes both software to execute programs and a programming language used to write those programs--JavaFX Script for the new technology.

Java has a strong brand in programming circles, but the technology caught on chiefly for use on servers and mobile phones. Sun is trying to go full circle with JavaFX, billing the software as a way to run software on desktop PCs. The software includes support for 2D and 3D graphics, audio and video, and animation.

But JavaFX has an uphill battle. Adobe Systems' Flash is widely used, Microsoft's relatively new Silverlight is headed toward its second, more versatile version, and ordinary HTML Web pages augmented with JavaScript has proven useful for many rich Internet applications that don't require a lot of pizzazz.

The JavaFX developer tools, it should be noted, come with Project Nile, a tool to export content from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, a hand-off that could help the technology match Adobe's more unified suite of products.

The final release of JavaFX for desktop computers is due in the fall, and Sun plans to release the first version of JavaFX for mobile devices in spring 2009, the company said.