The Walled garden argument
From David Herron's Blog.
“Javascript a.k.a. ecmascript isn't a bad language, and clearly a lot of things can be accomplished with it. But why is that the only language which can be used? ”
Because it took ten years for all web browsers to support the same Javascript ? Embed JavaFX (script type="text/javafx") all you want. It'll take another five to ten years for all web browsers to support it. The walled garden argument has nothing to do with reality. You can run all kinds of scripting languages in the browser, but nobody wants to maintain the sandbox technology and yet another scripting language just becomes yet another security hole.
Chui's argumentation suffers from being too overly broad. He sounds like one of those high IQ types who wants to solve everything using one language, one API, one computer and one programmer. In American they call this a “pipe dream”.
Java.net is disconnected with reality. For every guy who knows Swing/Java there are a 1000 guys who know HTML/DOM/CSS/Javascript. Silverlight is only marginally important because Microsoft controls 90 percent of the desktop marked and is the company behind C#.
JavaFX will ride the JRE in the same way AIR is riding Flash and PDF. So it's not irrelevant. The problem is that most Java developers don't know jack shit about developing user interfaces.
Comments
Hi Jan,
Thanks for calling me the "high IQ" type - wink . The idea of a inlining is actually a smaller and incremental goal than having one language ruling the web.
The inlining proposal goes somewhat like this...
Use JavaFX in a similar way to SiFR and SVG. A little bit of javascript can be used to extract javafx script from HTML DOM and then pass it to an JavaFX interpreter running in the applet.
Java applet technology is already everywhere, so there is little issue of waiting for cross browser support.
You belong to a rare class of people who can both code and do beautiful graphic design. My hope is that by making JavaFX accessible and easy to tinker with, it might attract a bigger crowd of people outside the programming community who are not so design-challenged.
Posted by: Chui | August 29, 2008 07:09 AM
I follow that argument, I do. JavaFX as SVG. But even with clever Javascript interceptor code JavaFX will still have an uphill battle. It's not easy to build such an applet and people are tired of software problems.
Safari on OS X crashes almost once a week. Firefox and Opera on Vista crashes once a month. CPU utilization has never been higher because of Web 2.0. Flash video ads infest every corner of the Internet. Mobile users are forced to install FlashBlock in order to block 10Mb video ads over GPRS/Edge. Some iPhone users have a 100Mb bandwidth cap per MONTH. That's ten heavy web PAGES plus advertising.
My point is just that a semi-perfect launcher might be worse that no launcher at all. People have gigabytes of RAM and we still end up swapping to disk because of all the crazy Javascript code.
Sun's decision to go compiled was probably a result of JavaFX Mobile. Sun wants to play in the same ball park as Symbian, Android and the iPhone SDK. Mobile phones have no Applets and few have Javascript. Creating two JavaFX runtimes might simply be too expensive.
Posted by: Jan Erik Paulsen | August 29, 2008 03:17 PM
What is your opinion on what Sun needs to do so that Java apps have a fresher look and feel? Do Java apps need designers?
Can Java be brought down a notch so that designers who can program can produce beautiful apps? e.g. Basecamp
Posted by: Chui | September 5, 2008 12:58 PM
This entry got some minor coverage on several websites. Sun needs to stop hiding behind "specifications", silly JDK release restrictions and bug trackers. They don't fraking use their own API's for real work. If they did, we would be a lot less grumpy.
Also... The Netbeans focus is childish anti-IBM propaganda. Sun lost out to Eclipse because IBM has a better product. SWT is unfortunately very Eclipse centric, so most people seem to program Swing inside Eclipse.
Sun probably just hires a design company to “do some design” in the same way people go out and “get some food”. Sometimes the experience is great, sometimes not so great. Sun uses people with PHD's to create “cool” software. That might work for virtual machines and hardware drivers, but web developers and OS X users will just snicker in the background when they present their latest “cool experiment”.
Sun is an engineering company that is completely disconnected with user interface programming. Why create a Swing application, when you can do the same thing in HTML and get five million users within a couple of years ? That's the sales pitch argument that Swing has to beat. And it's hard when Sun needs eons to implement what most people regard as trivial and basic functionality. They don't care that Swing (barely) supports Linux/EMT64, POWER6/zOS or Solaris/UltraSparc. They only care about their own platform.
Swing is older than Flex, AIR, WPF, Silverlight and similar in ago to Cocoa. It's obvious to anyone that Sun has let the API lay stagnant in order to save money. The latest 1.6 build 10 is fantastic, but we needed that years ago. Now most Swing development shops and either dead or doing Flex.
Why should I care about a new syntax when Teppefall Capture has no way of accessing the web camera from within standard Sun API's ? A feature that was present in JMF, but that has been removed in JavaFX. Sun doesn't need coolness. They need “Shit that works (TM)”. Complete and final API's that are more than a couple of LetsTellSomeoneElseToDoThisLaterInterface.java files.
Swing is the only system that is more multi-platform than Flash. And it's more powerful, but nobody knows because Sun spent almost a decade moping because of the dot com crash. They wanted to be Apple, but instead they became Dell + Java.
Posted by: Jan Erik Paulsen | September 7, 2008 05:00 PM