This is a pretty comprehensive rundown of the issues today. More puzzling to me than the technical stumbles/holes/blind spots (key for me being no integration path with Swing for the legacy crowd & no on-ramp for alternative JVM languages for the bleeding-edge crowd) is that it's never been clear IMO what space JavaFX is supposed to occupy in Sun/Oracle's ideal world.
If it's for building shiny baubles (which seems to be the case given *all* of the demos and examples I've ever seen), then it's been doomed from the start by Flex and AIR. If it's for building mobile applications, then my goodness, how is it possible that Google beat Sun to market with a critical mass of (essentially) JVM-powered smartphones? If it's for building "real" applications (and there's no indication that that's the case), then it's been doomed from the start by not carrying along the huge population of folks building on Swing, the NetBeans RCP, and the Eclipse RCP (not to mention the licensing decision to disallow redistribution of the JavaFX runtime). This is where I've seen the most promise for JavaFX, as there's plenty of room in the Flex/Air/Silverlight dogfight for another player, but there's so much wrong with the runtime, language, and approach (or lack thereof) to the existing ecosystem that it's hard to see things ever improving. For my money, give me Swing2, fix the applet/deployment experience, and fix the license/redistribution issues, and we'd be on that in a second. I really hate being such a pessimist at this point, but I don't see much room for hope -- short of a more pragmatic approach coming out of Oracle. Cheers, - Chas On Nov 24, 3:36 pm, Simon Brocklehurst <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't think it's a failure. The truth is that JavaFX Script is a > really productive and fun way to build rich client software. However, > there are some big questions marks over the technology at the moment. > These include: > > - Apparent slippage in the JavaFX release schedule: JavaFX 1.3 (Soma) > was originally supposed to be an end-of-year 2009 release - now it may > be Feb 2010; Prism (the all new high-performance JavaFX graphics > system) was originally supposed to be part of the 1.3 release, now > it's pushed back to the summer. > > - JavaFX applets in the browser are currently unusable on both Windows > and Mac OS X due to horrific rendering bugs (even leaving aside the > multiple-dialog box install procedure). With Java 7 slipping from > Feb 2010 to Sept 2010, it might be the best part of a year before the > applet situation improves (bbut hoping it's not a plug-in issue as > much as a JavaFX issue that's fixed in 1.3) > > - Features having to be cut, even to make the delayed release > schedule. For example, the integrated 2-D/3-D scene graph was > originally supposed to be part of the 1.3 release, but now the scope > has been reduced to take out rendering 3-D objects. > > - Poor performance with large scene graphs. This is promised to go > away with Prism - originally, it would have just been a few weeks > ago. Now it's probably at least six months away (see above). > > - Neither a full complement of controls, nor interactive tooling > available to make building high-quality UIs fast and easy. > > - Apparently zero momentum behind JavaFX Mobile. While Adobe is > signing up partners left, right and center for Flash on mobile, the > number of announcements relating to JavaFX have been conspicuous by > their absence. > > - No easy deployment for standalone applications; and no way > incorporating JavaFX components inside a Swing app. > > All of the above make it impossible to justify using JavaFX for real- > world projects except in a very limited set of circumstances; even for > those people (like me) that really want to see the technology succeed; > and most people won't even touch it yet because they think: it's so > far away from being useful; and they can't build on existing Swing > investments. > > Future milestones will be: the Soma release; the Prism release; the > tooling product releases; and the Java 7 release. Hopefully the > technology will become a viable choice at one of these milestones > (i.e. within the next year), otherwise, I suspect there really will be > some problems for JavaFX. > > The other thing that shouldn't be overlooked is that while Sun was > probably too small to take on Adobe and Microsoft in the RIA platform > battle, Oracle most certainly isn't too small. If Oracle wants to > make JavaFX the number one RIA platform, it certainly has the > resources to do so. I really hope Oracle delivers on the idea of > increasing investment in JavaFX to: first make it usable in the real > world; and second accelerate development to start bringing in time > lines, rather than have them keep being pushed out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
