June 4th, 2007
JavaFX and the Rich Internet Application landscape
I haven’t done a very good job of covering JavaFX. Partly it’s because I don’t come from the Java world and so I still haven’t totally grasped the full significance of the announcement. The other part is that there isn’t really anything to play with, so it’s difficult to dig in. But one of the things I came across this weekend was a post by Coach Wei of Nexaweb on JavaFX. I thought it had a great tone and while not a technical discussion of JavaFX, I thought it was a good perspective from someone who has worked with the Java world a lot. One of the quotes I liked was this:
All of these establish that RIA is the next generation application paradigm. Over the last 20 months, press has been dominated by Ajax and Flash. Microsoft’s Silverlight announcement tells the world not to ignore .NET. Java pioneered rich web applications years ago, and this JavaFX announcement firmly reinvigorates Java as a platform of choice for RIA.
He hits it on the head pretty well. RIAs are heating up, which in and of itself is great, but the fact that it’s touching so many different developer skillsets is going to mean great things for the web. There will always be concern about these technologies abstracting the web and creating small sandboxes all over the place, and I can see why that would worry people. But we’re going through some growing pains. First we need to show off why RIAs are great, and with more and more developers digging in, it’s going to be easier to do that. The fact that we can program against the .NET Runtime on a Mac inside the browser still blows me away, and it’s awesome. From what I’ve been able to gather, JavaFX is going to bring that level of power to RIAs.
One of my favorite opinions about JavaFX was from Simon Brocklehurst, who I had an email back and forth with earlier last month. He is very familiar with the Java world. He made the very good point that Java had a lot of traction with the RIA space, but they were a bit too early. Now Java is open source, it has a lot of developer momentum, and it’s very powerful. My favorite quote from him was in an email:
JavaFX runs on Java SE. Java SE *is* really a
super-powerful platform. I totally accept that it’s hard to use for
people that aren’t pretty serious software engineers. What I’ve
observed, over the last ten years of working with Java, is that people
who haven’t had success with Java are quick to say things like “Java
doesn’t work”… and those people make a lot of noise!
So I’m still going to have to figure out what the technical specifics behind JavaFX are. Simon’s post is a good primer at this stage. JavaFX the *language* is aimed at making it easier to build rich, interactive user interfaces by making Swing and Java2D more accessible. Swing allows you to build some great GUI interfaces in Java and it is a powerful tool, but it’s been tough to grasp. If JavaFX can lower the barrier to entry for it then that’s going to open up a richer world for Java developers, and that’s a decidedly good thing.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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