On Aug 31, 5:45 am, Casper Bang <[email protected]> wrote: > I still think Sun management made a mistake back in the day when they > positioned JavaFX to be a narrow Flash-like RIA technology rather than > a general purpose Java.Next - they actually had a chance of drawing a > line in the sand and open a new chapter. JavaFX may not have been > intended to take so many resources away from other things. but that's > what ended up happening with the result that JDK7 is massively late, > and people wonder whether Swing is effectively deprecated or not.
My version of this History, FWIW (I'm not insider to that either): I think the first big problem was the huge strategy changes that happened after the project's inception. JavaFX was first announced as a mobile thing, drawing from both SavaJe and F3. But the entire SavaJe stuff was canned, after Sun wasted a lot of money buying it and perhaps also by investing more engineering to evolve it into their own full mobile OS. At some point in time they either realized that they didn't have the resources for that battle, or that the result was not looking as good as expected. So JavaFX was recast as a mega-multi- platform (desktop/TV/mobile) toolkit, and also as a Swing 2.0 thing (more focus on GPU acceleration, scene graphs, DSL). The mobile profile became just a layer over the existing JavaME MSA platform. (And the entire JavaME is in a limbo now: it's hopeless for high-end devices, and the OSes that are ruling the high-end are not friendly to carry a competing application stack.) Oh, and don't forget the Java Store too; this is another big effort, very likely part of the original mobile-centric plan, that burned more money and engineering, just to be abandoned (unless it's resuscitating next Sep 20, but I'm not crossing my fingers.) All this churn has certainly cost development time and resources; JavaFX 1.0 might have shipped a full year year earlier otherwise. On top of that you have the huge mess of Sun/IBM/Oracle talks, acquisition, and transition which is right now just settling. Overall it's a miracle that since v1.0, the JavaFX has been delivering improvements as fast as they did, even judging only by the Desktop profile (Mobile and TV are not shipping, but if the JIRA bugs are any indication they've been working just as hard ion these too). P.S.: JDK7 is late, but not massively, if you count the "JavaSE 6.5" release that was the 6uN project (not even complete at u10: Sun/Oracle continued to make important feature improvements in u14, u18, u21, now u23). Indeed, it's well known that the 6uN project diverted a ton of resources from other things, even more than JavaFX did. -- 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.
