Sun offers JavaFX road map

Although Sun could have its work cut out for it positioning JavaFX against rival technologies, a Java developer in the audience was impressed.

"I have not had the chance to look at it [before now], but after these demos they showed, it's definitely something that I want to look at in the future," said developer Roland Esquivel, a software engineer at defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation.

"It's sexy," Esquivel said, citing high-definition video and audio capabilities. "It's something that will catch people's eyes and definitely get their attention," he said.

Sun officials also detailed Project Hydrazine, for cloud-based services. "It allows you to bring new services together, make them available, [and] provide them in a running cloud environment," Green said. Hydrazine is due after the release of JavaFX.

Another project on the horizon, Project Insight, enables JavaFX developers to communicate with their audiences via instrumented user action data. It will enable development of new strategies for ad placement.

The instrumentation service will allow developers and other third parties to collect information about how many people are using their applications and also send and receive information about patches and upgrades. Sun says it will be anonymous, meaning it will not collect personally identifiable information about end-users.

"It will be free for some portion of the developer community, and for some portion of commercial users, it will probably not be free," Schwartz said.

Sun also brought up executives from Amazon and Sony Ericsson, who showed their Java-based multimedia devices, such as Amazon's Kindle book-reading device.

Young, meanwhile, showed off a Blu-ray-based music catalog. He said he had been unable to do this with previous technologies, including DVD. The product features updating capabilities via the Internet.

"You can put your disk in there and the Internet will tell you that there's new material available," Young said.

During the post-keynote press conference, Green gave a progress report on Sun's ongoing quest to put Java on the iPhone, something that Apple has not publicly, at least, supported.

Sun, Green said, is well along its way in creating the technology to enable Java to run on the phone, Green said. But he deferred to Apple, which governs which platforms can be distributed with the iPhone. It is Apple's right to decide this, Schwartz added.

Sun officials also repeated mantras about consumer technologies overtaking the enterprise, as they had in a presentation last month.

"Businesses used to drive the technology adoption, but today it is all about consumers," Green said. Sun plans to leverage JavaFX in the consumer application space.

(James Niccolai of IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate, contributed to this report.)