Flash + JVM = Smiles

At its JavaOne conference, which kicks off in San Francisco on May 8, Sun is promising a major technology unveiling, code-named "Project Indiana."

My ZDNet blogging colleage Ed Burnette is speculating that Sun might unveil a head-to-head competitor to Microsoft's Silverlight, a k a "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere."

Sun still isn't talking. But its execs are dropping hints all over. And it sounds like at least part of Sun's announcement could involve a deal with Adobe, via which Sun will be distributing the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as part of Adobe Flash.

This would be an interesting development. It could explain why Adobe was ready to give away the ecmascript compiler source for free to Mozilla, since the JVM being included could make actionscript a thing of the past. It would also make their use of Eclipse for the Flex Builder IDE a more sane choice. This would be a step closer to the right direction for Adobe. Setting aside the the whole MS vs. Adobe war, however, supporting .NET and the CLR would be 10x sexier than including a VM that already failed to capture the hearts of client app developers the first time around. In any case, it's not unfathomable for Adobe to outsource some core technology like this to another company. Macromedia has been doing that for their video codecs since the first version of Flash that supported video. We'll have to wait and see, but if I had to bet, I'd bet that any ties between Sun and Adobe would have something to do with Apollo or Flex not the closely gaurded core of the Flash player... but who knows, Adobe is pretty good at creating bloatware ;).

[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=424

Update: Sun announced Java FX which indeed competes with Silverlight and Flash http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/