“Since the conclusion of last week’s JavaOne event in San
Francisco, I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with Sun CEO Jonathan
Schwartz about Java and the deathmatch that clearly looms ahead
between it and competing cross-platform runtime environments from
Adobe and Microsoft (Flash and Silverlight, respectively). Between
the relevance of last week’s JavaFX announcements to the mobile
market (basically, pushing the desktop version of Java down to
handsets) and Schwartz’s repeated sermons about how the number of
people experiencing the Internet through a phone greatly outnumbers
those who do so with a PC, it doesn’t take a lot of dot-connecting
to infer that Sun views the mobile market as the battlefield where
this deathmatch will happen. Also relevant to this ‘dot-connecting’
is Sun’s announcement of a scripting language designed to make the
Java Runtime more accessible to developers of rich internet
applications–the so-called creative developers who usually turn to
Adobe’s Flash runtime as their default target platform…”