Moving on to a "round house kick" (forked from Re: JavaOne roundup?)

[Richard Bair]

> 2. Wow, there is a JavaFX enabled Dukepad. Beeing a soldering nerd myself, hacking firmware and much cool stuff
> in my spare time it really kicked me in the first place. Then I grounded when I have seen that it was a childish puzzle
> with lego blocks.

What?

> The longer I think about that, the longer I am getting angry to see a 100 men powered development 
> team to build a demo on a demo board for a hand full nerds.

I don't know where you got that impression. Jasper did the design, and there were a couple of people who spent a couple weeks working on software. And that wasn't writing the DukePad software, predominantly, but it was fixing performance issues in Prism that affect all platforms.

The value is in embedded development. Before JavaOne we didn't have all the agreements in place to work with Freescale. The Raspberry PI has a nice following, is great for educational purposes and home-brew, so it was a great choice to build a demo on top of (as opposed to, say, a BeagleBoard or BeagleBone which is either more expensive or doesn't have the same size following). Having an actual project to work on also teases out bugs and performance issues, and most of the work leading up to JavaOne was in finding and fixing these issues. These same issues will affect any embedded project, including the RoboVM / iOS / Android work.

> Well that would be ok, if Oracle said that this is a demo
> on a prototyping board and the important platforms will follow soon. No word about iOS, Android, Windows8. 

Do you mean Windows Phone 8? Because Windows 8 is a given.

> Do you really believe that there are many people to build a Tablet like this? I am really sure non of the major 
> hardware manufacturer will build a tablet on top of this platform soon since Android is also free to us and is 
> much more attractive to the end-user. The only thing that I can image is that Oracle comes up with their own
> iPad-Killer in the near future (don't wait too long) otherwise this decision make no sense to me.

No, none of this. DukePad is not a product. We made that pretty clear, it's an open source hardware/software design for the Raspberry PI community. We will make no money off the designs and Oracle isn't selling anything here. For us it was a vehicle on which we could demonstrate our ability to run well on embedded devices, and find and fix bugs along the way. Oracle isn't going to produce a mobile device. DukePad was not any kind of product announcement. Those kinds of things happen in strategy keynotes, not in technical keynotes.

Richard