The Market Perspective- Competition among the Three Giants Adobe, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems:

Sun Microsystems has invented the JavaFX technology to emerge into the field of creating Rich Internet Application. Java can be a formidable player in this regard with this family of product which covers Java Development from the desktop to the web to mobile devices. But Sun is not alone in the run. As two other giants Adobe and Microsoft are also entering into the business with their respective product releases into the market. Adobe has recently added the final preview to their release of Flex3 as Beta version 3. Simaltaneously Microsoft has also taken a great step towards capturing the RIA market by announcing their Silverlight2 Beta2 release recently. Therefore, to stay in the long run Sun has to go through a tough competition with their fellow competitors.

Let us analyse why Sun has adopted a new language ahead of already existing strong programming technologies in context of multimedia development. This very question might have stressed many of our readers. The constant and fast growing RIA markets in today’s world is concerning more about the web designers and not relying alone on the developers in context of creating multimedia based application. The invention and use of declarative scripting languages has brought the advantages thus by providing much easier and faster development of content rich application and still restoring the basic powerful features of programmatic language. For example, a language called MXML which is based on XML is used in the creation of User Interfaces in Flex developed by Adobe. MXML is enriched by the feature of strong data binding capability of the language and uses ActionScript for programming. In Silverlight developed by Microsoft, another XML based language called XAML is used for UI application development. Silverlight is based on the .NET framework which facilitates the use of C#. VB.NET and ASP.NET. Similarly, JavaFX uses JavaFX Script which is a declarative scripting language like MXML and XAML to create UI easily and quickly. But JavaFX differs from MXML and XAML in specifying the GUI components. The code in JavaFX Script intends to match the actual layout of the GUI. Morever, JavaFX also has the capability to extend the power of Java by integrating all other Java Components within it. JavaFX makes the best use of Swing toolkit. JavaFX targets the Flash designers in developing rich internet application.

Sun’s Executive Vice President of Software Rich Green said that while JavaFX is basically concentrating on the User Interface Design and animation development in contrast of most of the the scripting languages are primarily concerned in web page creation. Thus it is targetting at a large volume of mass interacting with applications rich in graphical content and multimedia. According to the acknowledgement of the Sun officials JavaFX is somewhat similar in the use of enhanced graphical capability of Silverlight. But Silverlight differs in that it is mainly focused on Video-Streaming. The JavaFX mobile component of JavaFX technology is all set to boost the development of mobile devices with the added functionality of Java ME.

Although JavaFX Mobile has already created an impression of being technolgically promising still it will have to fight a lot to secure its position in the business against the large coalitions of other corporate houses emerging in the rapidly developing Open Source Linux Community.

With 5 billion programmers in Java SE platform and nearly 2 billion programmers working in ME Platform, Java claims a high volume distribution all over the world. As the JavaFX is said to heavily rely on Java based platform with runtime SE and ME outcomings may be predicted as satisfatory. But although for JavaFX mobile the users will have the built-in Java SE/ME runtime, for the users of desktop browsers Sun has to rethink in making strategic decision to mobilise the market. There exists a problem for desktop browsers to download and updates of Java while using JavaFX and in contrast Flash has an advantage in the context of the easier installation process and more security.