Sun has unveiled a new open mobile platform called JavaFX, which it hopes will bring open rapid open development to the mobile space, an environment long dominated by telcos and cellular carriers.
The company also introduced Curriki, an open source education curriculum that will give schools the same level of open source agility and help equalize opportunities between city and rural schoolchildren.
Speaking prior to a developer launch in Bangkok, head of technology evangelism for Sun's Developer Network Reginald Hutcherson observed that Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation had been saying a lot about how the media we were consuming today was being transformed by free software.
"A few years back, you got your key information from several sources. I got mine from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and a few sports magazines. I subscribed and I paid a fee. What's taken place almost overnight is that you get information, not from those places, but from Google," he said.
"Google has the best search engine on the planet and it's free. The best software on the planet is free. The way we are looking at software and software development is changing right before our very eyes."
The video sharing Web site YouTube was around for just one year before Google bought it for US$1.6 billion.
"This was a company that uses scripting, Java, open source and the Internet. The market is rewarding companies that are able to be very agile and innovate rapidly," he said.
However, the real revolution is just beginning, with most people now getting onto the Internet the first time through their cell phones.
Java technology has been around for 12 years and now has six million active developers and was fully open sourced in May this year.
"Ninety-nine percent of the smartest people on the planet don't work for Sun. We realize that. We want to facilitate their development on our technology--Solaris, Java and the like," Hutcherson said.
"At JavaOne we introduced Java FX, a Java scripting language that allows individuals who are content developers to develop rich scripting languages. What it means is that companies like YouTube and Flickr now can develop powerful front-end clients. This is the ability to create and drive innovation on small devices, cell phones, PDAs and the like," he said.
Sun has recently bought a company called SavaJe that has a small handheld stack which it is now combining onto the Java platform. The intention is to create an open stack for the cell phone, a prototype of which was demonstrated at the JavaOne developer conference. Based on Java FX and Java2ME, the idea is for a rich, open platform that is not controlled or dictated by the carriers.
Asked if JavaFX was a direct competitor to Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash, Hutcherson said that it was definitely an alternative to Flash, but the way the two companies go about the solution are quite different. JavaFX has an entire Java technology stack running the phone behind it, rather than just some graphics rendering on the top.
Another project unveiled at JavaOne is Curriki, a Kindergarten to 12th grade open source curriculum Wiki. Strictly speaking, this is a private project by Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. The idea is to allow collaborative curriculum generation and use by teachers from all across the world for free.
"It's an Open Source innovation. Nobody owns it. Teachers can contribute to it and create their own best chapters," he said.
Curriki has started with maths and the sciences and is open to the world to tap into free of charge. On the one hand, it brings education in major cities up to speed with the rapid innovation of the Internet, and at the same time, it also gives people in remote areas the same opportunities as those in cities.
Play video
» Ultimate virtualization blade
The company that Sun bought was savaJe not Savage... see www.savaJe.com as a former employee of savaJe... I should know :)
Posted by Pete Gousios on Saturday, August 18 2007 01:19 AM