You make an excellent point about improving the underlying Java SE platform. Sun is well on the way to delivering something pretty impressive on this aspect - still some bugs to squash, but they seem to be doing a pretty great job (at least on Windows XP and Vista).

For the first time in the history of Java, applets are starting to look genuinely interesting as a platform for delivering real (rich internet) applications. That actually buys Sun some time to get JavaFX Script right. As you know, it’s perfectly possible to build amazing graphical user interfaces by using Java. With “Update 10″ it will be possible to build amazing applets and deploy them inside browsers, and the new plug-in should allow interesting interactions between applet and browser.

As for the JavaFX Designer tool, if it’s possible, I think Sun pretty much *has* to demo it at JavaOne this year - it’s going to be such an important aspect of making the whole JavaFX platform a success.

It’s fine (although not ideal) if it won’t be at Version 1.0 for another year. It’s fine (although not ideal) if there’s nothing for developers to download and play with. But, to have nothing at *all* to show a year after announcing would be a little weak.

Having said that, if it’s not at a stage where they can do an impressive demo, then so be it. They’ll just have to hold their hands up and say it’s taking longer to build the JavaFX platform that they’d hoped, but they’re taking their time to get it right.

As you say much progress has been made on JavaFX script but there is still a lot to do - they have been focusing on the basics. For these sorts of things it’s always a trade off between rushing something out quickly and having to live with the mistakes you make for a long time, or taking the time to make it real good but risking it being irrelevant.

The really good thing has been the overall focus - as Joshy alludes to in the video - they have trying to improve all aspects, deployment, underlying Java2D as well as more designer friendly dev tools.

The devil is always in the detail with these kind of translators. The bottom line is: if it works well, then by definition it’s a great way for Java developers to be able to instantly develop iPhone apps, without having to spend time learning the iPhone SDK and Objective C.

That’s really a hell of a big “if” though… it would be majorly impressive piece of work by Innaworks if this product *did* work well.

Actually, I thought an interesting part of Sun’s comment about this was that they suggested they were in discussions in with Apple about how to include Java on iPhone. Having said that, it’s possibly not all that interesting - my guess is that the “discussions” aren’t all that productive

By the way, I’m pretty sure plenty of Mac developers *would* be intererested in having great Java support in iPhone (not crappy Java support, obviously). When iPhone was first announced, Apple’s was so over-run with Mac developers asking for Java support on iPhone that Apple had to ask people to stop requesting it.