On Feb 18, 12:18 pm, Karsten Silz <[email protected]> wrote: > So, would see yourself using Flash Builder 4/JavaFX Composer to build > "real applications"?
Although I was tempted by several products to drag-n-drop GUIs back in the 90's, the first one that seriously tempted me was VisualAge for Java. However, I quickly realized how such a code-generating tool worked against many basic design principles, such as maintainability and extensibility. Granted VAJ had a huge price tag that was a risk to be mitigated, and granted my tool of choice today is free and the best for JavaFX, I still find it impossible to build anything significant by way of drag-n-drop or "composing." The closest I could get is composing my own custom library of assets/snippets and grabbing by simple name recognition. To me, drag-n-drop GUI building still remains an anti-pattern and I don't see that changing. Additionally, to date, there hasn't been enough time in the JavaFX lifetime to make custom palettes an option. With 1.3 around the corner, especially after experiencing the significant language changes made moving to 1.2 (end of 2009 spring???), how can anyone comfortably get settled into project/organizational standards yet? As a side- note, I think this is also why the marketing for JavaFX has been confident but not saturating--the persistence and patience required to deal with all the undocumented nuances from minor-version to minor- version have been only game for the naturally intuitive. I think Sun marketing has managed and balanced this well, with a new broader phase coming soon. I must also say the documentation retrieved by search engines used to be insanely counter-productive because you didn't know which version of JavaFX the code was made to run under (Scala has this problem, too). Things have been getting cleaned up, though, but problems still remain. Like this link http://java.sun.com/javafx/1/docs/api/ on http://blogs.sun.com/javafx/category/Docs Finally, I want to say having worked with ActionScript/FlashIDE/ FlexBuilder/Air and JavaFX, I predict a hockey-stick curve in terms of coming intuitively inspired JavaFX app sophistication, which will leave the plateaued and dated Adobe apps conceptually and functionally in the last decade. The language-centricity of JavaFX is a huge enabler for those who will push for fluency and prosody. In a few years, I'd like to see a serious scientifically measured competition between the two expert camps (Adobe-stuff vs. JavaFX) for a full- lifecycle project, a competition that measures the human factors, cognitive ergonomics and costs of the architects/designers/developers/ testers/administrators using their sponsored tool/language suites. My money is confidently on JavaFXers. One can't also leave out dealing with Adobe customer service as a suite customer. Back in the day, I thought Macromedia getting bought was going to be a good thing. I was very wrong. Any thoughts? Steve Sobczak -- 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.
