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Posted by editor on February 6, 2009 at 9:39 AM EST

JavaFX goes mobile... without "JavaFX Mobile"

A year and a half ago, James Gosling pointed out that increasingly-powerful mobile devices meant that things were converging on SE, a point that led to a bunch of "ME is dead" misinterpretations that he then needed to correct.

In a sense, we're seeing the same thing play out in JavaFX. Initially, "JavaFX Mobile" was announced as a separate platform, but as Joshua Marinacci reports (in his first blog in ages), There is no JavaFX Mobile. There is only JavaFX.

When you write JavaFX desktop apps with the common profile you are also writing for mobile devices. Desktop and mobile aren't different platforms. There is only one JavaFX. Even though there is no mobile emulator for Mac, I've done all of my mobile samples work on my Mac. I write my desktop apps to support window resizing, resize to the approximate size of a mobile device, then save my code. I only switch to Windows every now and then for a quick test in the real emulator. As long as I only use the common profile everything just works.

It struck me this morning how much of a big deal this is. I don't know anything about Java ME, but I know JavaFX. Even though I'm not a mobile developer I can write mobile apps with JavaFX. I couldn't do that before. One SDK, one set of tools, one language, one set of APIs. There is no JavaFX Mobile. There is only JavaFX.

So, if someone asks you "desktop or mobile", JavaFX developers can now just say "sure!"

Also in today's Weblogs. Fabrizio Giudici wonders about Dropping support for Java 5? "So, I'm about to decide to drop support for Java 5. This means I'm losing most of potential users on Mac OS X. On the other side of the coin, the saved time would contribute in having more regular releases (I haven't made an official release of blueMarine for more than one year - without them I'm probably losing all the potential users)."

Finally, Xuan Yun shows off Style Binding in Synth Look And Feel. "The style binding mechanism is another great feature of Synth look and feel. By using it, we can define several styles for same kind of swing component."

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 70: Bit-side , in which Thomas Schüppel of bit-side talks with Terrence about his companies experience developing on mobile devices.

In Java Today, the OpenJDK project has announced the rollout of a Community Code Review Server. The server will offer public access to "webrevs" from the project. As Tim Bell explains, "if [a] change is a bug fix, we use a script called webrev to inspect modified files and generate a collection of web pages showing the proposed changes. The pages are hosted on a web server and a link to them is circulated as part of the review request."

Jean-Francois Arcand has announced logo contest for Project Grizzly. "The deadline is February 28. Let the artist in you express herself/himself!" Submissions can be made via Twitter or e-mail, and full details, including prizes, are available in a forum post

Transaction processing should achieve a high degree of data integrity and consistency. The article, Understanding transaction pitfalls, the first in a series on developing an effective transaction strategy for the Java platform, introduces common transaction pitfalls that can prevent you from reaching this goal. Using code examples from the Spring Framework and the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 specification, series author Mark Richards explains these all-too-common mistakes.

The latest java.net Poll asks "How many Java books are you in the process of reading?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion.

In today's Forums, abc3d wonders about Java multidimensional arrays. "How to Copy multidimensional arrays in java? I mean is their any system defined class to copy it like System.arraycopy();? Actually I want to copy some part of multidimensional array."

ebresie points out an interesting possible application of modularized Java in Re: Java 7 / Modularity, Zero, OpenJDK, and JavaME. "I was reviewing one of the presentations from Devoxx (http://blogs.sun.com/abuckley/resource/Devoxx2008-ModularityInJava.pdf - slide 4) about the modularity and saw with the modularity work, they envision being able to run JavaME applications on JavaSE. As the power of the handhelds improves the need will reduce, but there will always be lightweight devices that could still use the platform."

tjquinn explains a Web Start security concept in Re: web start app client fails in 64-bit openjdk and glassfishV2.1. "The URLs used for the Java Web Start support do not correspond directly to directory structures named the same way on the server. This is to prevent malicious users from using the Java Web Start support to browse the server's directory structure. So it's not surprising that you didn't find directories named in parallel with the URL path or that creating them yourself didn't help; the server is not looking there for the file(s) but maps the paths to the correct on-disk locations."

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JavaFX goes mobile... without "JavaFX Mobile"
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Comments

by deanydean - 2009-02-09 00:19

Round of applause for the band choice this week. A link between Java and punk rock is a real rarity, I think it may be the first I've seen! Keep up the good work.