SUN HAS DELIVERED the first JavaFX preview - its attempt at a rich Internet application (RIA) development platform, that goes head-to-head with efforts from Adobe and Microsoft.

The JavaFX site has launched displaying a snazzy demo of JavaFX in action, plus download the JavaFX Preview release and SDK, explore the code samples and tutorials, and grab the variety of plug-ins for different development applications.

Sun is providing 'Project Nile' which provides the exporting of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator elements into JavaFX applications.

As usual, Sun is also providing a Netbeans 6.1 plug-in, that allows integrated JavaFX development into its own IDE.

Interestingly, the bundled Java Runtime Environment 6 Update 10 beta, delivers a runtime with a new Java browser plug-in that provides the ability to drag a running applet out of a web browser and transform it into an application running on the desktop.

JavaFX's main component is its "high-performance declarative scripting language" - JavaFX Script. It also comes in a mobile flavour, which is intended to more-easily deliver RIA to the mobile platform.

Jacob Lehrbaum, senior product Manager of JavaFX said only the Java platform, "is pervasive enough to allow developers to build and deploy RIAs across desktops and browsers on more than 800 million PCs, as well as billions of mobile phones and devices. JavaFX builds upon this foundation to deliver immersive and rich presentation capabilities to the existing Java platform."

Sun intends to first position its JavaFX marketing case to web designers, furthering the cause to standard Java developers at the platform matures.

While perusing the JavaFX site, we noticed several of the links didn't work quite as expected. Fortunately this is a preview release, but you'd at least expect the main demo-site to work.

If you're sick of the eye-candy you're better off going to Sun's original JavaFX site here. µ