We told you a little bit earlier today about Adobe and its plans to really push Flash as the universal way to access video and applications across multiple mobile platforms. It looks like Adobe may have a battle in store for it, as Sun is also looking to pick up a piece of that same mobile content pie, now offering its JavaFX platform for mobile devices.

JavaFX builds off the enormously popular Java language, adding support for media-rich extensions that Sun hopes will provide the same kind of experience as users are used to from interacting with Flash programs. Since it uses Java at its core, developers can easily add graphical interfaces on top of existing Java code.

One of Sun's goals was to smooth over the transition from programs running in a high-res web browser window to a tiny mobile screen. The JavaFX Mobile software lets coders preview their work on a virtual phone from the development environment, so they should be able to confirm how it looks at each step along the way. The language supports a subset of the full JavaFX list of visual effects, targeting the limited graphical processing power of many smartphones. JavaFX programs sticking to this core set should look the same both on a PC and a JavaFX Mobile platform.

While Sun has quite a battle ahead of it to get a leg up on Flash, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, and LG have already committed to using JavaFX Mobile with their handsets, so there's definitely industry support for the platform. We'll just have to wait and see which gets the best group of developers behind it.

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