Oracle to Accelerate Mobile, Java runtime

Everyone seems to be ditching Oracle after it’s acquisiton of Sun Microsystems first over Killing OpenSolaris, and recently because of the Java lawsuit on Google Android. The good leaders – Sun CEO and Father of Java had foreseen it.

Today at the Oracle OpenWorld event, Oracle revealed its roadmap ahead for Java and Java mobile. Oracle is committing on improving client-side Web support and mobile application development with JavaFX.

J2ME used to be a standard for Mobile apps, wherever app portability was prioritized. But with the release of more powerful platforms: Android & iPhone, it has more or less become irrelevant as native toolkits tookover with better user experiences.

Oracle wants to undo this. With JavaFX it wants to restore client-side relevance. As I reviewed earlier, the biggest challenge is to boost JavaFX performance and integrate it more seamlessly with the standard Java Runtime Environment (JRE). What’s more is that Oracle wants to make it perform better not just on desktops but also on Mobiles, thats why, Hardware-accelerated rendering and heavy ARM optimization for mobile devices is under the works.

Oracle also promised a Java rendering engine to enhance 2D and 3G graphics, available next year. This will plug into the virtual machine and into Java FX, one of the most important technology layers Sun added to open source Java, supporting the creation of rich graphics and user interfaces. As The Register describes, the engine will support “modern graphics hardware accelerators”, notably Direct X for Windows and OpenGL.

Java FX scripting language had some nice, Python-inspired features for creating user interfaces, but it proved to be too slow. Now Oracle is giving up ont his scripting and letting user chose any or the VM scripting languages like JRuby, etc.

Apart from that, Oracle will continue to innovate in Java and the promised Merging of Java Hotspot, JRocket VM should complete by sometime next year.

For mobile, Oracle will improve support for natively rendering HTML inside of JavaFX, which will potentially make it easier for developers to build content-centric mobile Java applications.

“We are very excited about the upcoming enhancements to JavaFX, which will enable it to become the premier environment for rich client applications,” said Oracle’s Java Client Group director Nandini Ramani in a statement. “With new Java APIs, Java developers will be able to incorporate powerful JavaFX capabilities into their applications with greater ease. New hardware-accelerated graphics and HTML rendering capabilities will unlock possibilities and enable a new wave of innovative applications.”

However, the biggest problem is still fragmentation. It’s not really clear how many J2ME-enabled devices can properly run JavaFX applications. iPhone is totally de-void of J2me, blackberry high-end devices also don’t support it.

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