The Planetarium

In taking a week off, the Planetarium has lots to catch you up on !

JavaFX has already issued Update 1, mostly with media playback improvements, like progressive download. The Janitor was podcasting with Cote after the launch, and JavaFX found a place on the cool wall at Devoxx. And its nice to see how many people are putting up their JavaFX apps on their blogs. And making new JavaFX tools, and running the SDK on Linux, even as the JavaFX team works on the production version. So is JavaFX itself an amazing Java application ?

In Java SE-land, there's new buzz over what additions to the Java language to put in JDK 7, with votes from Devoxx and JavaEdge. Joe Darcy put up a list of guiding criteria. Meanwhile there is an early access version of the 64bit browser plugin (high on the request list for too long) for the JRE as part of the upcoming Java SE 6 Update 12. And news of some really interesting optimizations of Java SE on the AMD chipset to get the best out of its multiple-cores.

Meanwhile, a new Java ME project has popped up, literally ! Either as a MIDlet or popping up as your phone's idle screen, the Java ME On Device Portal (ODP) offers a slick way to get new Java ME apps, like Flickr clients or weather apps, onto your users' phones. Whatever the backend app store. Another reason (see TS-15) to come to the MM3D conference in the new year.

Back in 2009 !