I came accross this on Winter Olympics web site created using javaFX. While it may not be the best demonstration of the technology, JavaFX installed seamlessly when I went to that web page. The performance was good and the graphics as good as Flash. While Silverlight and Flash seem to get all the headlines, Sun/Oracle certainly seems to be steady making progress.

Here’s an interesting article from Javaworld . It talks about how Flash is becoming a ubiquitous platform just like Java. When Flash 10 becomes available next year, it promises to run the same content on smartphones as well as Desktops essentially emulating the Java’s philosophy of ‘write once run everywhere’.

Not that folks at Java world are sitting siltent- Java has been working on JavaFX which promises a rich user experience and will compete with Flash. However, the mobile client for JavaFX is still in infancy and it is unknown when the SDK will be available.

With more than 1 million developers worldwide, and a good roadmap for penetrating into mobile devices, there’s a good case to be made that Flash may make Java obsolete at some point.

I spent some time reading JavaFX FAQ and it seems that JavaFX is continuing to make progress and is taking head-on Flash. Some of the intereesting points I noted were:

- There’s no authoring tool as of today, and is expected later in 2009.

- JavaFX mobile support is not there, but Sun is working with OEMs.

- JavaFX today supports Windows and MacOS.

- JavaFX has already been demonstrated on Android.

- JavaFX is built on the technology that Sun acquired from SavaJE.

Much is being discussed about the Silverlight and how it compares to Flash. Now HTML5 standard is being backed by Google and Apple. The race is on for platform of choice. I came across this article that compares and contrasts three. The author predicts that HTML5 will be the winner….. I am not ready to predict winner just yet, but agree that the playing field is getting crowded. Add JavaFX and Sproutcore to the mix, and now you have five players where Flash was the only player until recently.