Josh On Design

I know I haven't been blogging, twittering, or doing the FaceBook very much lately. That's because I've been very, very busy working. As we promised last summer, the next release of JavaFX coming out soon. For desktop developers you won't notice too many changes, mostly bug fixes (and a feature or two). The big news is that this will be our first release with full mobile support. Of course this really isn't news either, since it's what we promised last summer. In fact, mobile support has been the driver for this release. Pay attention for news coming out soon with the details. So with no news for you, why am I writing this blog?...

I'm running a sample JavaFX app on a demo phone (yes, a real phone). I won't tell you what phone it is but I will say that it has a very nice high resolution screen (no, it's not an iPhone). As I've been working with this device it struck me how easy it was to code for. And there's a very good reason for that. When you write JavaFX desktop apps with the common profile you are also writing for mobile devices. Desktop and mobile aren't different platforms. There is only one JavaFX. Even though there is no mobile emulator for Mac, I've done all of my mobile samples work on my Mac. I write my desktop apps to support window resizing, resize to the approximate size of a mobile device, then save my code. I only switch to Windows every now and then for a quick test in the real emulator. As long as I only use the common profile everything just works.

It struck me this morning how much of a big deal this is. I don't know anything about Java ME, but I know JavaFX. Even though I'm not a mobile developer I can write mobile apps with JavaFX. I couldn't do that before. One SDK, one set of tools, one language, one set of APIs. There is no JavaFX Mobile. There is only JavaFX.