> > If it is correct that JavaFX won't be supporting iOS or Android > (officially), IMO JavaFX will start fading away as soon as there is a > reliable technology that can create apps for all platforms.
People have tried HTML5 as a way to create apps for mobile platforms. Most of the big names who tried this e.g. Facebook have abandoned it. Personally, I don't care much about JavaFX on Android or iOS because mobile has such different UI requirements and conventions to desktop platforms. I can write a JFX GUI that looks and feels good across Mac/Win/Linux with very little platform specific code because those platforms are all quite similar and anyway, the respective developers of those platforms trained users to expect apps to not fit in perfectly. On mobile, things are different: you can't just use a desktop UI, you need a totally new UI and maybe even feature set built from scratch. On Android the UI toolkit is closely linked with the lifecycle rules. And UI's tend to be a lot more consistent, with the worst offenders being apps that weren't updated to the latest UI conventions yet rather than apps which simply reinvent the look and feel from scratch. I'd actually prefer that Oracle focuses on making a great desktop solution. Hype aside there are still many apps not appropriate for mobiles or tablets. Then with a Java or JVM-language backend I can have just two UI codebases, one for desktop, one for Android and that gets most mobiles. Then RoboVM's Cocoa bindings can be used if need be for iOS. BTW I don't think JavaFX can "fade away" given that it's starting from obscurity already ;) Truth is the world lacks a convincing cross platform UI toolkit at the moment: there's Qt, which is fine for C++ but is not so pleasant from other languages, there's Swing, there's HTML5. Both Swing and Qt have a reputation for making ugly GUI's. That may or may not be deserved these days, but people remember the history. Plus deployment is horrible. That leaves HTML5, which despite its manifest limitations at least can be made to easily look good via CSS, follow modern fashions, work on everyone's computers and people don't have to download an extra app runtime. So for many apps it's appropriate especially when the bulk of the app logic runs on a server. JavaFX 8, at least based on my experience so far, can be used to make attractive and web-style UIs, thus matching the first of HTML5's capabilities, plus it has the benefit of actually being designed, unlike HTML which just evolved. This leaves deployment as the primary problem. For this reason Danno is my current fav member of the JavaFX team :) Nothing personal guys, I just see cross-platform deployment of *reasonable sized* apps to be the biggest competitive weakness right now.
