Accompanied by an onstage appearance from Neil Young, who announced released of his complete music archives on a Java-enhanced Blu-Ray disk, the tone of Sun’s annual JavaOne extravaganza was pointed at extending the rich Internet environment to mobile devices.

The crux of the announcements centered on JavaFX, a rich Internet application presentation layer (complete with its own declarative scripting language, JavaFX Script) first disclosed at last year’s event. Currently in develop preview, it’s going to start rolling out in phases, with support for desktop due in the fall, flowed by mobile and other platforms next spring.

The idea behind JavaFX is to provide a scripting language that makes it easier for developers to use all the 2D, 3D, and audiovisual APIs already in the Java ME and SE frameworks. Sun emphasizes that the net effect is that developers can write rich media apps to any device with a JVM, which happens to include 91% of all PCs and laptops, and according to Sun’s count, roughly 85% of the world’s smart phones. Of course, some rivals like Adobe would consider that number to be entirely relative.

This being a widely webcast keynote, Sun unleashed its share of splashy demos to show what all those rich media Java APIs are really capable of. Amazon came to the stage demonstrating their Kindle, which for history buffs appears to be its answer to Microsoft’s ill-fated eBooks; a demonstration of how you can mashup the household brands of social computing, ranging from Facebook to Twitter and Flickr; a PC-based emulation of what a JavaFX rich client would look like on an Android phone; and a rotating ball spinning thumbnails of 200 videos in 3D animation. They also showed a demo where you could create a JavaFX app on a web page, then drag it from a browser window onto the local desktop, and still run the same.

JavaFX will initially release the desktop version with the next version of Java SE 6, update 10, which Sun described as a complete rearchitecting of the spec, making it more modular. Speaking of deconstruction, that’s what Sun’s done for the upcoming version 3 of Glassfish ESB. V3 will begin with a 98k kernel, from which you could run a home media center, with progressive layers added on like a Russian doll to the point that could become, in effect, the services backplane for a global enterprise.

Sun also announced a couple new projects, including Project Hydrazine, which provides a platform for deploying new services into the cloud which could be shared, followed by Project Insight, which will add instrumentation to JavaFGX so as a developer or content owner, you can specify how utilization is tracked (data would not go back to Sun).

When Jonathan Schwartz came to the stage, he reiterated in more gentle language a follow-on to Java’s original battle cry of write once, run anywhere. His appearance followed a pronouncement that MySQL daily downloads have increased by 30% since Sun acquired the company back in February. Schwartz explained that one of Sun’s main objectives with Java would be to keep it free, as in free beer. “Free, freely available, philosophically free so it can travel wherever the market demands.”

“We’re planting a stake ion the ground,” said Schwartz. “The Java platform will provide more insight to content and developers than any other platform in the marketplace. It will give developers the power to instrument what they build. We are going to make it very easy.”

And with that, Neil Young came to the stage and extolled how Blu-Ray was the first medium that could bundle all his collected works (including the usual multimedia stuff, like notes, out-takes, etc.). And of course, since this was Sun’s stage, and it was JavaOne, naturally, he cited how Java made it possible to develop the presentation of his work in context. And then he exited to the strains of Rocking the Free World. The appearance got Sun what it rarely gets: ink in the mainstream media (outside the business pages, where it just announced a major layoff).

By raising the profile of JavaFX, Sun sets itself up in a collision course, not so much with Microsoft (since it’s not a Java platform), but with Adobe, which proffers its own cross-platform Flex and AIR environments. Admittedly, while aside from Ajax, there is no single category killer Web 2.0 de facto standard environment (if you can call Ajax standard), competition is wide open for becoming the framework to use after Ajax runs out of gas. JavaFX, through JavaFX Script, makes existing Java media APIs easier for developers to work with. Sun claims the advantage is that the JVM is ubiquitous and therefore, JavaFX is the best way to develop rich Internet apps for it. Adobe counters that the Flash run time is equally ubiquitous, and that all developers need to learn is ActionScript, a wayward sibling of JavaScript. Of course, there’s that spitting battle over whether Java has such a clawhold on as many phones and devices as it claims, but for the moment, that's more devices than currently run Flash.

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