Sun releases preview of Silverlight, Flash competitor JavaFX

Sun Microsystems has released a preview version of its JavaFX technology for building rich Internet applications, which it announced last year would compete with Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash-based AIR.

As its name implies, the platform utilizes a scripting language that is a subset of Sun's Java called JavaFX Script. But as BetaNews' Scott Fulton noted last year, the language JavaFX resembles JavaScript (which was originally developed outside of Sun, for Netscape) more than it does Java.

Sun's goal is to leverage its Java developer community to gain a foothold in the burgeoning rich Internet application (RIA) space. Flash has dominated the Web, while Java has seen some adoption across mobile phones. Now the battleground has become the desktop; these companies foresee Web applications leaving the confines of the browser into a richer environment that includes 3D graphics, audio and video, as well as animation.

The JavaFX package, which is still in development and won't be officially launched until later this year for production use, includes the SDK with compiler and runtime, a plug-in for the NetBeans 6.1 IDE for building JavaFX applications, and a new JRE Java runtime that enables users to drag Java applets out of the browser and onto the desktop.

Also included is Project Nile, a tool for exporting graphical content from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to JavaFX applications. Both Microsoft and Adobe already have whole suites of tools to ease development on Silverlight and AIR, so Sun has a lot of ground to make up. The company plans to release a full graphical authoring tool for designers at a later date.

So here's how the RIA scene stacks up at present: With the advantage of the biggest installed base is Adobe Flash, which racks up the lion's share of scalable vector graphics applications on the Web. While Adobe is expanding the Flash system with the Flex environment, its language is based on an embedded XML schema that remains browser-dependent.

Microsoft answered the challenge with Silverlight, a .NET subset that can run in Linux and Mac OS, which teases developers with compatibility with its ASP.NET AJAX version, but then tries to lure those same developers into the broader realm of .NET development with applications languages like C#. It starts out browser-dependent, but in full fruition doesn't have to be. Microsoft is already finishing up the second iteration of Silverlight.

Coming from the opposite end of the field and arriving late to the party is Sun's JavaFX, which builds on the Java platform by creating a new language that the same interpreter can execute (just like the .NET Framework can interpret multiple languages), that tries to be JavaScript the way Sun would have done it from the beginning.

But Sun's objective is to try to yank RIAs off the browser as much as possible, moving clients into a realm where they're no longer dependent upon Microsoft or open-source groups to keep the technological ball rolling. It is a very interesting time indeed to be a Web developer.

Developers can get a first taste of JavaFX from the technology's Web site, which offers the preview SDK download, tutorials, sample code and a community for interacting with other early adopters. JavaFX for mobile devices, meanwhile, is slated for spring 2008.