Java MVM (Multi-VM, Multitasking VM) resurrected?

While reading up on JavaFX (formerly F3), I stumbled upon a Chris Oliver's blog entry describing his approach to MVM. I was surprised to see that he was looking into this while working on F3.

It really makes sense, though. Java applications suffers from one major issue and that is the startup time. It takes quite a while for the almighty JVM to initialize and warm up. So to make JavaFX successful in the bloody battle with Flash this issue has to be resolved and his approach looks like a possible solution.

There used to be a project at SunLabs led by Grzegorz Czajkowski, called The Barcelona Project which was targeted for JDK7. Unfortunately this project got canned last year after Grzegorz left Sun for Google. I'm not quite sure why SunLabs froze the project. It definitely looked very promising.

One way or another I think that it's not going to take too long and (close to) instant start of Java apps will be real and Consumer JRE will be the solution.

JavaFX Killer App - PDF Reader

This is an awesome app. It hasn't been released yet due to licensing issues with the underlying PDF rendering library IIRC. But the work is in progress to get it out.

JavaOne Day 2 - JavaFX Details + Enterprise Rails

Another great JavaOne day is over. Today I did a better job of avoiding boring sessions like yesterdays Web2.0 profiling lab :)

Briefly some important info:

1. Joshua Bloch did a great job at his Effective Java session. The presented Builder pattern (among others) is something I'll definitely use next time when the need surfaces.
2. Colgate runs an internal RubyOnRails application talking to the SAP backend via SAP4Rails. It's more than likely that more Rails+SAP applications will surface in the near future, because SAP guys love how easy it is to build a pretty GUI with Rails. And I realized that I should be happy that I didn't become a SAP code monkey :)
3. JavaFX or JFX (formerly Form Follow Function (F3)) details:
   1. in my understanding it is a wrapper around AWT, Swing and Java2D libraries, that uses it's own language to expose easily usable, yet incredibly powerful, API for building rich GUIs
   2. the language, JavaFX Script, is statically typed and as of now is interpreted, but the work is in progress to get rid of this 2nd level of interpretation in the JVM, which will speed up JavaFX 10-20x
   3. can be deployed as a J2SE app, Java Web Start app or an applet
   4. as an applet it weighs somewhere around 700k after PK2000 compression
   5. enables the building of truly amazing GUIs with a very little effort
   6. it is easily possible to transform SVG into JFX Script - that makes it possible to create a GUI based on output from tools like Adobe Illustrator
   7. since JFX is using AWT/Swing internally, it is possible to embed existing GUI components and display them via JFX. The same is true for trying it the other way around - embedding JFX elements into exising Swing applications.
   8. it's still a work in progress and I have a feeling that very interesting things related to JavaFX will be announced in the upcoming weeks/months