No, the green IT area is spartan, quiet, and there’s really not a lot going on. Fujitsu Siemens has the best-populated stand, showing off its zero-watt PCs and low-energy servers. IBM has an area devoted to energy optimisation (again in servers); Sun has something similar, backed up by a static display of a low-energy vehicle it sponsors but isn’t related to anything very much; and Hitachi has what you’d be hard pushed to describe as a stand since it didn’t seem to be showing anything at all when I was there.

And that’s pretty much it, really. It all seemed uncomfortably as if lip service is being paid to green IT, but very little else.

In other halls – especially the Future Parc dedicated to research – there were plenty of solar cells in evidence but it’s telling that few of these are currently in commercial products. One of the rare commercial uses of solar panels I did see was from a company called Sunload, which was showing off a really rather cool set of bags, luggage and foldaway devices using flexible solar panels. Bags with solar cells in the lid flaps are pretty much the best way I’ve seen so far to make use of solar energy in everyday life. The products aren’t distributed in the UK but I’ll be trying to coax some stuff out of them to look at anyway.

And, of course, there was the biodegradable flash drive, which while not likely to cause the world to stop turning on its axis – and also not really biodegradable – was at least innovative.

But it’s a bit of a poor show, all things considered.

And so Sun, the company that invented Java around ten years ago, has just released JavaFX. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite so cynically dismissive of a new software platform. It seems a desperately cack-handed move to get into the rich internet application market, and it comes at least three years too late.

According to Sun, JavaFX is, “an expressive rich client platform for creating and delivering rich Internet experiences across all screens of your life.”

I’m irritated already – whoever came up with the marketing phrase “all screens of your life” (which crops up all over the JavaFX site) needs a good talking to.

Putting it another way, JavaFX is a competitor to Adobe Flash and its Flex RIA platform. Which is much like Silverlight, the Microsoft competitor that currently isn’t really getting anywhere.

To succeed, JavaFX is going to have to displace its massively well-entrenched competitor with some seriously compelling advantages.

How about a compact footprint? Erm, no. JavaFX runs on the standard Java runtime environment, which is still a lumbering beast of a thing; it’s a 15MB download. Starting up a Java applet on a web page is always heralded by a fanfare of hard-disk grinding, and JavaFX is no different. The JavaFX examples still take far longer to come to life than a Flash application, while managing to look less polished and demonstrating none of the silky-smooth fluidity of Flash.

All that aside, the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the way in which JavaFX is being marketed. It treats people, especially developers, like total idiots.

Says Schwartz:

“We certainly hadn’t up until recently looked at the impact of time-based media, of video playback, of high-quality audio”

It would be more accurate to say that Sun has paid just enough lip service to video and audio to get developers interested in it, and then frustrate the bejeezus out of them by not supporting it properly. The Java Media Framework has been skulking about like an illegitimate child in the backwaters of Sun’s website since the late 1990s.

Now we come to the real doozy. According to Schwartz, JavaFX “enables you to bypass hostile browsers”. This is accompanied by a slide showing us the hostile browsers in question:

I’ve never read such a ridiculous statement.

The argument seems to be that Sun is graciously giving us a way to avoid those terrible money-making browser companies (including, um, the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation) and paving the way to simplicity and clarity by introducing a competitor to Flash. Words fail me.

Schwartz goes on to say that JavaFX is for “content owners that want to deliver their content without obstruction.”

What? What obstruction? Anyone who wants to deliver an internet application can construct it in Flash and it will run in any one of the ‘hostile’ browsers. Where’s the obstruction in that?

Turning now to Sun’s Eric Klein, giving some insight into the groups of people that JavaFX was apparently designed for. Klein opines:

The third group we thought a lot about was the visual designer, folks who use things like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and other graphics tools. And what they said to us is: ‘let us join the party. Let’s create a designer-developer workflow, so that our content… can seamlessly get into the development process

The absurdity of that statement genuinely does my head in. As if anybody on the planet is going to think for one second that Adobe designers are going to turn to Sun for their tools by preference, rather than Adobe’s own RIA platform, which is aimed at precisely the same usage models.

It all feels horribly like a cynical catch-up ploy from a company whose share price has dropped 84% in the past year, compared to drops of 45% and 54% for Microsoft and Adobe respectively. Which would be fine were it not for the tasteless way in which it’s being marketed.

The nicely ironic twist, of course, is that all those JavaFX videos run in a Flash video player.

Having spent the past couple of days wilfully ignoring the Java update nagging away in my System Tray, I finally relented and installed the latest version, only to be confronted with the following screen:

Admittedly, Sun was only trying to force the OpenOffice installer on me, rather than automatically downloading the hundreds of megabytes that comprise the full suite. But after the furore caused when Apple automatically ticked the Safari installation with iTunes updates earlier this year, it’s amazing that companies are still resorting to such cheap tricks.