Java FX
There has been a lot of broo-ha about Sun's new Java FX platform. Personally I see Java FX as an attempt to move forward on the mobile platform and to replace Java ME with a more powerful Java SE stack, but a lot of people see this as a Flash/Flex/WPF competitor and therefore po-po it as such. Maybe the people at Sun didn't get or read the memo. Or maybe the memo raised an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException when reading it backwards. Who knows.
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.
Comments
"brouhaha" :)
Posted by: F.Baube | May 29, 2007 10:31 AM
Joost is based on XUL? No wonder the performance is so godawful. Sun also made the "enterprise" web language in Java and look at the horrible mess that is java.net.
I am not really worried anyway. When was the last time you saw flash used for anything other than video or silly games?
Posted by: Potatoman | May 29, 2007 10:47 AM
reading you makes me even less interested in Java FX than before. If I got u right, there's nothing JavaFX does that other platforms cannot do better - and the little it does is half baked and useless. Where are the good points here?
Posted by: herval | May 29, 2007 07:07 PM
"and yet no one at that company is able to put together a good looking Swing application. Not one."
That's not true anymore. Jasper Potts wrote Imagery (check out xerto.com), one of the most impressive looking Swing apps I've ever seen.
Posted by: Romain Guy | May 29, 2007 09:01 PM
I've heard this JavaFX Mobile theory being thrown around quite a bit, but as anyone who actually works in the Java mobile space will tell you, it's nowhere that simple. For starters, there are really only two reasonable mobile JVMs, from IBM and Nscomm. IBM J9 doesn't support Swing at all, while Nscomm does, but it is subsequently pretty slow and very expensive. All the demos Sun has been pushing for mobile are running on the SavaJe platform which is supported by exactly 1 shaky device. This is all vaporware until Sun released a robust, Swing enabled JVM for mobile.
Posted by: Alex | May 30, 2007 05:21 AM
JFXPad is a simple editor. It doesn't really have to look very slick at all, that's a very strange complaint.
Posted by: Augusto | May 30, 2007 08:36 AM
yup,i agree! JAVAFX is just another shot at Macromedia Flash.,I'm sorry but its true.JAVA applet technology was great (about 8 years ago) then came flash - small,fast,friedly, easy install for users.For developers a great authoring environment and best of all ubiquity - APPLETS were dead (and still are for the most part).
I really hate scripting languages that attempt to do cool graphical stuff with code,the JAVAFX 'believers' say that its easy , and it is if you are geek enough, but even for me a self made geek and for most people out there doing more that just displaying a 'sweet button' requires too much hard work - don't believe me? take a look at SVG , its great , it easy (?) , it requires nothing more than a text editor to make cool stuff , BUT , try making an animation or something more complex than just a shape with a blur filter applied - yup possible ,but very time consuming.
The same applies to making GUI's with scripting languages not just FX but also groovy etc...
Silverlight too has an uphill struggle ,It won't work on MAC (doh!) ,but at least MS can harness the power of the WMV codec.SUN has for the last 10 years given us the -wait for it- NOTHING in the compressed video playback arena AND NOTHING in high quality compressed AUDIO either.And all of a sudden it want a slice of the FLASH market.... yeah right!!
Posted by: wahid | May 30, 2007 01:08 PM