5 September 2013

JAVA 8 ON ARM: ORACLE'S NEW SHOT AGAINST ANDROID?

Oracle has unveiled a developer preview release of standard Java 8 for the ARM processors that power most mobile devices, including capabilities for the JavaFX rich media platform, in what one analyst sees as a shot across the bow of Google's Android mobile platform. 

Java SE (Standard Edition) 8 Developer Preview Release for ARM is intended to get ARM developers testing Java SE 8 before its scheduled release in 2013, said Oracle.com blogger Roger Brinkley. 

Forrester Research analyst John Rymer suggests the move is meant to hurt Android, a consequence of Google's Android mobile platform surviving a patent-infringement lawsuit by Oracle earlier this year. "JDK [Java Development Kit] 8 and JavaFX on ARM can be seen as an attempt to create a 'Java standard' alternative to Android for ARM devices," he says.

Rymer dismisses JavaFX as worth developer attention, calling it a technology that never made it big. "JavaFX is a nonstarter because it has no adoption," he says. "JavaFX was conceived by Sun as a portable rich Internet app environment to compete with Adobe Flash/Flex, and later with Microsoft Silverlight as well. The idea was to bring function provided by browser plug-ins into the Java core. Nice idea, but it just never gained adoption. I don't see that changing." 


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