At one point it was Apple, then IBM was supposed to be it more than a couple of times, well the buyer of Sun ends up being Oracle and I think this is a good thing.

First of all (and related to that panel from Watchmen), I was getting a little anxious about all this merger talk and wished it was done with. It’s difficult for a company to be under merger talks for too long, and as a user of a lot of Sun technologies it makes you nervous. So I’m glad this seems to be over with.

Anyways, I think ithis is better than the IBM-Sun (BlueSun) merger because it just didn’t make much sense for IBM to buy Sun. They overlap too much on hardware and software, and I was afraid IBM was just going to buy it to finally kill off a hardware competitor and just take ownership of Java. With Oracle, you still have IBM as a strong Java player and Sun actually brings a lot of new things to Oracle.

Yes, there are overlaps, but there’s a bigger chance for projects like Netbeans to survive under this environment than in a company with IBM which would rather keep putting money on Eclipse.

What I wonder about is these products:

JavaFX - Does Oracle really have the stomach to compete in the client space? I’m hoping they have the guts to keep at it and not settle only on the server side. Client side Java is still important, and makes sense when you want to have very well integrated tools that go from end to end. As for mobile, who knows, maybe Oracle wants to expand.

Glassfish - Can Glassfish survive in a company that uses WebLogic. I think so, at least initially or for the short term. Glassfish can still be used as the “JEE” reference implementation, so there is a chance Glassfish can still continue being a supported project.

MySQL - I’m not really sure Oracle wil want to keep spending money on this for obvious reasons. But who knows. Anyways, MySQL is open source so it can’t really be killed in a sense.

So I’m glad the speculation is over, good luck to all the Sun employees during this transition. This year should prove to be a very interesting and surreal JavaOne!

Hey kids, don’t forget, when you open up a CRT display you can electrocute yourself if you don’t know what you are doing. So please don’t do what Bjork just did in the video above, specially if all you are doing is showing us how the electronics inside are like a “little model city … with houses and streets … and this elevator …”.

Do pay attention to her warning, “don’t let poets lie to you”. They don’t know anything about electronics!

I thought it was going to be a bit later, but JavaFX is ready for download. The site has also been redesigned, and to the relief of many (I’m sure) it actually uses the technology it’s advertising (at least for the video).

I’m downloading the Netbeans bundle as I write this, so we’ll see what this package brings but from the JavaFX blog here are a list of features available in this release;

Here are just a few of the features in JavaFX 1.0:

• KeyFrame animation
• XML & JSON web services
• Fast and easy to use 2D graphics
• PerspectiveTransform for 3D effects
• Pixel-filters and visual effects with GPU hardware acceleration
• Video and Audio support using both native and cross-platform codecs
• Swing Integration
• CSS styling (more on that later)
• Windows XP+ and Mac 10.4+ support with Linux & Solaris in the works (more on that later too)
• The new JavaFX Script language with binding and animation built in, running 10->20x faster than Javascript
• Visually rich applets that you can drag to your desktop and save for later
• Integration with Photoshop and Illustrator
• Access to the world’s huge library of Java code and APIs
• A new website with docs, tutorials, and tons of BSD licensed sample code
• A sneak-peek beta of JavaFX on mobile devices

Also, I’m interested to hear if anybody else is having some problems with the JFX enabled video. I’m seeing some weird errors in my Java console, and I don’t think it’s starting fast enough for me as intended. I see this error (but the video still plays at the end).

network: Wrote URL http://dl.javafx.com/emptyJarFile-1228403636122__V1.0.0.jar to File D:\somepath\javaws\temp\6.0\47\a6b8bef-751ceabc-temp
java.util.zip.ZipException: ZIP file must have at least one entry
at java.util.zip.ZipOutputStream.finish(Unknown Source)

Well the file is called “empty jar file”, I wonder what it’s trying to do.

BTW congrats to the JFX team, the release surely took a lot of hard work and sleepless nights.

JavaFX 1.0 will be released tomorrow (Dec 4th). Chris Oliver invites us to judge for ourselves if this project delivers on the promise of an improved user experience for rich clients in the Java Platform.

I remember well when this technology was announced at last year’s JavaOne. Chris’ demos impressed the audience, and in his sessions he showed off a really cool JFX powered PDF reader (sadly, I don’t think they ever released this demo). Yet, there was and has been lots of skepticism about the project, or maybe I should say about client side development in Java. Part of this has had to do with startup times, and bad implementations of the Java Plug-in. Lots of enhancements have been done in these areas, in part motivated I think, by client side initiatives like JavaFX.

Anyways, it will be fun to finally download and try out version 1.0 of this technology. What I’m hoping is that Sun has stepped up in their tooling for this, and that the download comes with a good set of useful demos that spark the creativity of both designers and developers. We’ll see.

I’ll have more to write about this once I try it out, there were a couple of projects (yes, one of them was a follow up to my JFX Clock example) I was working on using earlier versions of JFX but I’ve been waiting for the final release to continue these projects. Over the few weeks/months I should post a lot more examples and impressions of this. Stay tuned.

BTW: I noticed my JRE was automagically updated to 1.6 update 11, probably in preparation for tomorrow’s release? I’m a bit unclear on how JFX is being “pushed out” to existing JRE installations.

Vote for somebody, anybody … just go out and vote!

Tomorrow’s election day and it looks like there will be record turnout. Hopefully that is the case, here in FL early voting has proven to be very popular but the lines have been long. Anyways, happy voting day!

Penguin sketches from a year ago.