Teppefall Labs

Flash is a success because it has a tool (Flash), a content pipeline (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Affects), server objects, a vector engine and video codec's that runs almost everywhere. Flash is more common on the desktop than Java. Java on the other hand is on almost every cellphone and since cellphones are soon becoming desktop “replacements” (Apple iPhone, Sony Ericsson P1i, Nokia E90) this is an interesting place to be. Whether Java FX is for the desktop or for mobile devices is currently unknown (to me anyway) but it reminds me of Macromedia old “Flash Mobile” speak about building the application once and deploying everywhere and in everyone's pants. “Is that Java FX you got in your pocket or are you just happy to see me ?” Well, Macromedia bored me to tears with all their “HTML is dead” nonsense so maybe I have a higher bullshit tolerance than most industry bloggers. I don't feel like mocking Java FX because Sun's propaganda department still live in 1999. Although it is telling that Sun new “cool” technology is the work of one dude on his spare time (?). Imagine what Sun would have said if two or maybe three people had worked on this. You would have to invent new words to describe it.

Java FX came out just after Microsoft Silverlight. Some say this is the “evidence” that Sun is lagging behind Adobe and Microsoft. Well, if they are, they are adressing the wrong problems. Silverlight has less support for UI widgets than Java FX. Silverlight is C# logic, 2D vectors and video in a plugin in the same way Flash is. Java FX has no video (Quicktime for Java is very brittle) and has no vector format. Java 2D is high DPI compatible and all that, but I only know of one guy who has done any work moving vectors into Java 2D and I think 24-25 people are aware of this and none of them are content and artwork producers.

The 3D stuff available in WPF could possibly be done in JOGL (I am guessing) and it will even run as an Applet. No-one would actually create such an Applet visualizer (The Applet Loader is slower than Lucent's old Inferno platform and less stable) but it is nice to see that Sun engineers are no longer requiring grant { AllPermission } to every marginally interesting functionality. The XSLT team at Sun forgot to check Applet support before releasing 1.4.1 and because of that Fabric is 120 lines longer than it needs to be.

Anyway, Java FX is mildly interesting to me. My biggest gripe ? Well, the Java FX pad is a bad Swing application. Just like every other Swing application coming out of Sun. Sun made JFC Swing.. and yet no one at that company is able to put together a good looking Swing application. Not one.

Average Joe is not impressed. Average Joe downloads Silverlight and Apollo instead. The final irony ? Silverlight and Apollo has no/limited Linux support. But since Linux people discuss license agreements until the end of time, Mozilla XUL might take over that. Just look at Joost.