The 3rd IndicThreads.com Conference on Java Technology kicked off at Sun-n-Sand Pune. The meet started off with Mr. Harshad Oak giving a general introduction and then taken up by Mr. Ganesh Natarajan (Chairman NASSCOM, CEO Zensar Technologies) where he talked about “How the Indian IT-BPO industry is facing the current global uncertainties”, highlighting the ways how the downfall can be handled by belt tightening, salary moderation, expanding to 2/3 tier cities, domestic market, creating new products; tackling new verticals, end-to-end service. and by not being just US centric.

Over the last few decades, software applications evolved from character mode terminal applications , to desktop applications, to client/server (network enabled desktop) applications, and now to Web applications. Client/server applications brought distributed computing to reality first. One of the key differentiators for these client/server applications is connectivity – they connected to the server over a network and received and sent data over full duplex network connections and had access to realtime or near realtime data, depending on the network latency. The server could push a message to the client anytime.

JavaFX has been in the making for some time. Despite all the talk about JavaFX since JavaOne, as yet there was no SDK or release available for developers to try out. Sun has now announced the availability of the JavaFX Preview release at: http://www.javafx.com. JavaFX has promised a lot and is expected to be faster and easier than Swing as well as competing RIA technologies.

Canoo has released UltraLightClient (ULC) 08, a library to build rich web interfaces for business applications. The new release claims to simplify the development and deployment of web applications.

Jim Weaver, one of the best known names in the JavaFX world talks to IndicThreads about JavaFX Script, where it stands today, how it compares to other RIA technologies and where JavaFX looks headed. Jim gives us an overview of the development cycle for a JavaFX Script application. He also talks about the benefits of using JavaFX and the challenges faced in its
adoption.