Sun formally started its JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco with a series of keynote presentations intended to showcase JavaFX. JavaFX is the company’s new rich internet-application (RIA) technology. It has been described by Sun as a family of products that are required for creating RIAs with engaging content.

JavaFX has been positioned as a competitor to Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight. JavaFX Desktop 1.0 will be available in the third quarter this year. JavaFX platform is expected to build on the power of Java to facilitate content authors and designers as well as developers so that they team up to deliver RIAs. Movie Cloud is a 3D graphical user interface from Sun that can be used to exhibit multiple high-definition videos from a user’s compilation concurrently. On the other hand, Photo Flocker helps users to search for photos by tags and see a cascading medley of the results.

The company also showcased its Connected Life product which powers RIAs by delivering an application across a web browser, desktop operating system, social network and mobile phone.