On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Andrew Jorgensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's a DOM-based graphics model that can even be accessed from outside > plugin (javascript) or be generated dynamically by any web service.
That's cool. Flex (the flash-based RIA platform from Adobe) does allow transparent access from flex to javascript functions, and vice-versa. However, the app is not served up as DOM XML; Flex expects a pre-created .swf file to come from the server. However, they do supply an apache module that compiles your .mxml files into .swf files on-the-fly on the server. Not the same as in-browser modification, but probably nearly as useful(?). JavaFX is in the same boat as Flex. The applet has to be pre-generated on the server. > You can program for it in any .NET-supported language (yeah, probably > even fortran if you're into that). That's SL 2.0 profile only, the > 1.0 profile is javascript-only. Flex is limited to ActionScript 3 (which is Adobe's implementation of ECMAScript 4 -- aka JavaScript 2), but due to the wide use of JavaScript, I don't think that this one language only limit is an issue for most developers. JavaFX and the soon-to-be-released Java 6u10 plugin (which makes the JVM load fast and Java applets not suck) can access any Java class. So you can use any langauge that runs on the JVM (which exceeds the number of languages that can run on the CLR). Ruby, Python, JavaFX Script, BeanShell, Groovy, Scala, Scheme, etc. > Mono is orders of magnitude faster than JavaScript. Tamarin may help > that some. There's this cool Silverlight demo where you can play the > same chess algorithm against itself, one in JS and the other in .NET. > .NET is around 100 times faster (and always wins). I'm sure there are > many factors involved there but it's enough of a difference to impress > anyway. I'm not sure how fast Tamarin is compared to any given JavaScript engine in a browser. However, here is a post from some guy who benchmarked Tamarin against the Java 6 JVM. His test has Java running 25 times faster than Tamarin. http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/entry/hotspot_vs_adobe_tamarin_vm Java 6 (and thus JavaFX) is faster than .NET and even C/C++ (in many cases). My guess is that the spread is even wider between the Linux JVM and Mono, though I haven't done any benchmarking with the latest releases of each recently. http://blogs.sun.com/dagastine/date/200606 http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/hotspot_performance > Early adopters have reported things like that they were able to > re-implement their flash apps that took a year to develop in a week or > so. The company that produced MusicPinBoard claim that they created the entire app in 8 days with JavaFX. There isn't a point of reference to Flash or Silverlight, but impressive nonetheless. http://www.musicpinboard.com/screenshots.html > Novell will provide Moonlight plugins for FF2 and FF3 that will be > compatible with supported versions (meaning not end-of-life) of major > linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, [open]SuSE, probably RedHat) on > i586 and x86_64. A big limitation of the new Java plugin is that Sun is only producing it for FF3. They expect the community to create a backport for FF2. > Mono is deemed a risky technology primarily by people who are > emotionally invested in hating Microsoft. MS has an interest in the > dominance of .NET on any operating system. They are learning to > accept that Linux is not going away. Hypothetically speaking, do you think that MS would stand idle while a Mono/Moonlight powered world eventually starts to tip the desktop market towards Linux? I don't think there's any risk when using Mono right now. I agree that MS wants .NET everywhere... Right now. However, personally, I do worry that future popularity of Linux may eat into MS market share and that's when they'll show their teeth. However, to quantify my fears, I do think that tying ones self to Flash/Flex is probably more risky that using Moonlight. Java/JavaFX would be infinitely less risky as both the JVM and JavaFX are open source projects... That is if the Java 6u10 plugin and JavaFX lives up to the hype. > That's my take on it. As stated above my comments don't necessarily > reflect the position of my employer. This post ended up being a lot > longer than I meant it to be. I hope it's not taken as inflammatory. Thanks for sharing some of these Moonlight details. I do think the project is very interesting and potentially a runaway success. However, right now Flex 2 owns about 80% of the RIA market share and Flash Player is installed on 98% of all computers (more ubiquitous than Windows or IE), while JavaFX is open, free, has good open source dev tools, and no one company controls its fate. Moonlight seems like it's somewhere in the middle. -Bryan /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
