Oracle's Plans for Java Unveiled at JavaOne

msmoriarty writes "Oracle had lots of Java announcements at this year's JavaOne. So far the plans include: 'The availability of an early access version of JDK 7 for the Mac OS, plans to "bridge the gap" between Java ME and Java SE, an approach to modularizing Java SE 8 that will rely on the Jigsaw platform, a new project that aims to use HTML5 to bring Java to Apple's iOS platform, the availability of JavaFX 2.0, a pending proposal to open source that technology, gearing up Java EE for the cloud, and a delay in the release of Java 8.'"

Oracle

[Dunbal]

At the rate you're going, I will soon be using Java None.

Re:And they said Java was dead!

[lolcutusofbong]

If you want to talk about dead platforms, look no further than Perl.

I love the fact that you're posting this on Slashdot.

Re:Desktop

[chrb]

Well, in hindsight it would have been nice if Sun had adopted SWT and its native widgets instead of pushing Swing on the desktop for years and getting nowhere. Yes, I get it, writing a cross-platform native GUI layer that acts the same on every platform is hard, but they had numerous options. They could have bought or licensed QT. They could have adopted SWT. Or wxJava. Or even GTK (like most Mono LInux desktop apps).

It would have been nice if they had open sourced the JDK a decade earlier instead of waiting until they felt the heat from gcj. Java could have been the dominant platform for writing cross-platform desktop apps, instead Sun was pushing applets, and it took until SWT before I saw the first Java desktop app that didn't suck (Eclipse). Imagine my surprise when I found that the second Java desktop app that didn't suck (Azureus) was also based on SWT.

Applications like Eclipse, Azureus, and Banshee show that Java/Mono style languages can do desktop apps, but for whatever reasons the Sun AWT/Swing combination went nowhere. If it were a true open source project I'm sure they would've adopted another GUI widget layer, but they didn't, probably because Sun wanted exclusive ownership rights.

Re:Desktop

[SplashMyBandit]

Actually, if you know what you are doing then Swing is second to none (to bad most people don't have enough decent knowledge of Swing to use it effectively). With the Nimbus look-and-feel it is also pretty nice (at least that's what I have heard from the users that are used to fugly Windows apps - that are even more inconsistent than the Java ones).
SWT seems ok until you start to develop it. Then you realise it is awful. Then if you have to develop in SWT off Windows you realise it is even more horrible. Then you have professional projects where you need to extend SWT and you look deep under the covers and realise SWT is really, truly bone-deep-ugly. Then you go back to Swing and life is much, much better - especially ever since Java 1.6u10+ (Nimbus and fully hardware accelerated rendering on multiple platforms).