Did you hear that loud thud at this week’s BlackBerry Developer Conference, in San Francisco, CA? Listen closely… I did. That sound you hear may be the door closing on JavaFX, the Oracle, Sun and Sony-backed Java RIA platform. The question for JavaFX… does BlackBerry’s adoption of Flash for RIA in its platform spell the likely death nail in JavaFX?

JavaFX Platform is a great, dynamic visual presentation tier with lots of promise, in need of a champion to implement and support. It may be too soon to really say, but JavaFX is clearly in a perilous state. It’s been out there for 2+ years now, but still lacks the tooling, significant backing from mobile and RIA players in the market beyond Oracle-Sun and Sony. And Oracle acquiring Sun… Oracle is an enterprise company, not a company that knows or really deals much with RIA technologies. Sony, an Adobe competitor in some arenas, and Sony’s partner, Ericsson, are JavaFX’s last best remaining hopes… Sony for desktop JavaFX and Ericsson for JavaFX Mobile.

Ericsson is an Android partner though. It remains to be seen how well Android and JavaFX Mobile work together technically. And, there’s the promise of HTML 5 for RIA as well over the next few years. With Android, iPhone Objective-C/Cocoa, BlackBerry, and to a less degree Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm webOS - I don’t see much hope for JavaFX Mobile as an RIA solution, especially with BlackBerry deciding on Flash. The question for RIM… will they support JavaFX in addition to Flash?

JavaFX Desktop has even a harder road to go, imho, with Flash and Silverlight, by far, the dominant players. Java’s strength has been server-side and mobile, then desktop last.

More and more, JavaFX seems to be all but dead now. It’s last, best hope or two… fully being distributed to the Open Source community, whether it’s Apache.org, Sourceforge.net, etc. imho. Otherwise, maybe RIM will step up and consider or reconsider and evenutally offer JavaFX as an option, alternative to Flash for RIA on BlackBerry. What do you think?

* For more on JavaFX at Apress, please click here.
* For more on BlackBerry at Apress, please click here.

NOTE: Author and speaker, Anthony Rizk, will be doing a Book Signing for his new Book, Beginning BlackBerry Development, being given away for qualfied attendees, at the BlackBerry Developer Conference on Thursday Nov 12 at 2:30pm PDT-US at the Conference Services Desk, which is same level as where the Keyonte was down the hall from Registration Area.

Please chime in below on your thoughts and solutions to getting JavaFX more tooling, more support, more adoption, etc. Please comment below or reach me on twitter at http://twitter.com/steve_anglin .