Sun introduces consumer-flavoured Java

Sun Microsystems plans to introduce a friendlier way to write Java applications for consumer devices, an attempt to derive more profit from Java and stake a greater claim in the next generation of Web applications, reports ZDNet India.

To address compatibility problems with mobile phones, Sun's executive VP of software, Rich Green, has detailed JavaFX Mobile, a package aimed at mobile-handset makers designed to make Java applications more portable across mobile phones.

With JavaFX Script, Sun is trying to revive the use of Java on small devices, like set-top boxes, and in PC Web browsers, which the language was originally designed to do in the 1990s.

Scientists at the University of Calgary have created the world's first complete object-oriented computer model of a human body, reports Science Daily. Recently unveiled, the 4D human atlas, dubbed the CAVEman by the team who created it, allows scientists to literally get inside their experiments by translating medical and genomic data into 4D images.

The 4D human atlas is built upon data from basic anatomy textbooks. Fundamental body systems and organs were rendered into animated drawings by a graphic artist, and converted into Java 3DTM to bring them to life in the Cave environment.

CAVEman resides in the Cave, a cube-shaped virtual reality room, also known as the "research Holodeck", in which the 4D human model floats in space, projected from three walls and the floor below.

Blogger Daniel Krook has been thinking out loud about how to bridge Java and PHP, reports DJD. His thought-process started with posts about working with PHP and the IBM WebSphere SOA application development environment.

In that line of thinking was the idea of building a bridge between PHP and Java. "In essence, a PHP-Java bridge enables PHP developers to access Java code from within their applications and vice versa. The benefit is that you can re-use libraries or services deployed on one platform from code that exists in a different environment," says Krook.

"While you can always use Web service APIs to communicate between your applications over HTTP, PHP-Java bridges provide a method to access the external application's API directly from the source code. As such, they are much more efficient than traditional network calls," he adds.