Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

Wayne Parrot thinks it's going to be HTML5. His work on WebKit for SWT aims to prove it:

We have implemented a bidirectional bridge that allows you to implement JS objects in Java and to interact with JS objects from Java. This feature has turned out to be very useful as we are leveraging the power of HTML5 technologies in a much more dramatic and efficient manner from Java now. This is a dev strategy that I have wanted to leverage for sometime. I'm so impressed by what is possible that I'll make a controversial claim that if you are a Java UI developer and are not paying attention to the advances in web UI technology then prepare yourself to be blown away in a very short order by much more capable and productive UI developers that understand how to use new killer web UI features on the desktop.

WebKit's growing dominance in the mobile space (iPhone, Android, S60 and now Palm webOS) as well as the desktop make this a pretty intriguing UI option for Java developers—more so than JavaFX, perhaps. I like JavaFX script, but it wasn't the first dynamic scripting language specifically designed to complement Java for the purpose of developing RIAs. That was JavaScript, which already has great mindshare and energy that shows no sign of flagging. One can't help but wonder about JavaFX while the very future of Sun itself seems so uncertain.

Speaking of RIA's, a call-out to Jo Ritter for his recent comment on RMAs—Rich MobileNet Applications. This application model, which spans mobile and the desktop by introducing the stackless Java stack, is finally hitting some mainstream handsets thanks to ProSyst and Sprint. But let's get serious: that can't possibly come to pass until there is an entry for Rich MobileNet Application in Wikipedia, guys! Get on it!