There has been a huge shift in embedded computing that has been slowly happening for years, but became a sensation overnight. Suddenly embedded systems have become powerful enough to run full OS/platforms and are cheap enough to be accessible to the average developer. The birth of the Raspberry Pi epitomizes this shift. It is an inexpensive computing platform ($25-$35) that fits in your palm, yet has equivalent graphical power of an XBox.

The important thing for Java developers is that suddenly all your skills and experience are directly translatable to embedded development. You can run full Java SE (and now even JavaFX) on a Raspberry Pi with no changes to your code. The same IDEs, debugging tools, libraries, and frameworks you use for desktop and server development work as well. And if the machine-to-machine (M2M) growth projections of a 20-fold increase in the next 10 years holds up, your next job may very well be as a Java device hacker.

Come and see Stephen Chin talk about the Mocha Raspberry Pi Hacking (JavaFX and the Raspberry PI) at this year’s JAXConf in Santa Clara.