Here it is my second wish in the "Oracle" series... what about JavaFX Mobile? I've tried it several months ago and I've written a small application, blueBill Mobile, running on an HTC Diamond phone, that allows to browse a taxonomy of birds, record observations and eventually showing near-by birder mates (and their observations) on a map. While the website is still a draft, I've started the experimentation with a few users (italian people, that's why temporarily the home page is not in english) - at a very preliminary stage, with reports of a few people being unable to launch the application.

Sincerely, when I wrote it the past summer I expected that by 2010 I would have been able to run it on a good number of mobile devices. Unfortunately, the only JavaFX Mobile runtime currently available is for Windows Mobile, which is one of the platforms seriously in danger of vanishing. There are probably a few other mobile phones, beyond the HTC Diamond, able to run JavaFX Mobile - but I don't know which ones. This is almost stopping my beta-tester program with blueBill Mobile, because I only recruited a handful of testers, so I have to push and roll out the "plain" JME version (that was already planned, anyway).

That's a pity. I really hope that Oracle, within the next JavaOne, is able to announce agreements with mobile manufacturers, to make sure that JavaFX Mobile is supported. I think that it's very important that Symbian, Meego and RIM are supported - and possibly Android too, even though this will create frictions with Google. I know - and it has been publicly said in the past - that there are existing prototypes for most of them (Android included), so it's a matter of politics rather than engineering.

Thus, Oracle, please hurry up - without a good spread by Summer 2010, I think that the fate of JavaFX Mobile will be bad.