Convergence and Java FX

David Berlind writes a very interesting blog with his take on convergence onto a rich Internet experience on mobile devices. Check out his video interviews of Jonathan and Rich.

One comment that David made in his blog was very interesting to me:

Of the three companies all vying for a converged market, Schwartz believes that the current global footprint of Java across devices and operating systems along with Java's open source nature makes it the leading candidate over Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight. ... That could be the case. On the other hand, with Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun coming from their relative areas of strength, the one equalizing factor may end up being Moore's Law. If for example, Sun can now fit Java SE into handsets in a way that it could not before, whose to say that hanset manufacturers won't soon be able to fit all three runtimes in their devices (something that desktops already do with grace). In other words, for developers, it may not be either/or.

Well, to me, that does sound very possible. And that takes me to a conversation I had at the Apache Derby unBOF yesterday evening, I chatted with some folks from Nitobi. These guys are delivering rich components in AJAX, particularly components that handle large data sets.

I asked them what they thought of Java FX, and they asked the question I suspected would be asked a lot: "how is this different from Flash?" Not being a scripting/Flash developer, and being very new to Java FX, I didn't have an answer. They were concerned that as developers they would now have to support multiple solutions with no standard between them. And David Berlind seems to be saying, this could very well be the case. The hardware platform may not be the forcing function everyone is hoping from just because it's going to powerful enough to support all the popular runtimes.

But then they proposed a solution that was very interesting to me. Flash, Java FX and Silverlight all employ a declarative model for defining/configuring rich components. What they would do is define their components in XML, and then use XSLT to output the appropriate code for Java FX, Flash or Silverlight depending on what's available on the client. That sounded pretty compelling to me.

What do you think? I'm just brainstorming; I don't do this for a living.