Survival of the fittest – Flash Lite, Silverlight Embedded or JavaFX Mobile?

There seems to be a splurge of new technologies being introduced in the recent months by the biggies. Just when serious debates had actually begun making rounds comparing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to Adobe’s Flash technology, yesterday there was yet another announcement made by Sun Microsystems at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.

Sun introduced the JavaFX platform focused exclusively for rich application development (RIA), placing it on the same platform as Adobe’s Flash/Flex and Microsoft’s Silverlight development environment.

According to the announcement made, the first product which would be introduced of the JavaFX family would be the JavaFX Mobile. Sun plans to sell the JavaFX Mobile directly to the handset manufacturers and at the same time also give away its open-source JavaFX Script for developers to use to create applications for the 5 billion devices that already run Java.

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As a developer I’d only like to comment by saying that there is absolutely no doubt that Java ME has always ruled on mobiles. Although it has had a successful round of 6 years, and is now considered to be graying, launching of the JavaFX Mobile may be a great move by Sun to inject a new life into it. A move to also prevent developer conversion and divert the media attention from Flash Lite. They might also be hoping to attract developers to get back to developing better and richer mobile content with a technology they are most familiar with.

Silverlight Embedded still has a long way to go in proving itself, but Flash Lite which is currently in news will have to penetrate much more across regions for consumers to gain faith in it. Apart from US and Japan, Flash Lite is yet to see a carrier and consumer adoption on a large scale like Java on mobiles.