Tom Eugelink

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since Dec 18, 2006
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Recent posts by Tom Eugelink

The statement "is a bit late" is correct. However, Flex / Flash suffer from their legacy, mostly based on the fact that flash initially is an animation framework. You can bolt only so much on top, before the foundation starts to cause problems. You can see this from the changes that have been made to the scripting language, as it is being matured to support full fledge applications.

In Java the GUI design also suffered from legacy; Swing works fine, but it is considered complex and difficult-to-do-right. So Sun also had a problematic foundation in its framework for build GUI's. And they decided to break with it and do a complete rework; JavaFX is a completely new technique, targetting a new level of GUI (hardware rendered 2D and 3D), but based on the experience of Java2D and Swing.

Silverlight is also such an attempt, but the difference with JavaFX is the JVM. The JVM is still faster and wider spread (supported OS wise) than DotNet's VM. And you can use existing Java, so JavaFX's software library base is enormous.

Therefore I feel one has to congratulate Sun for being so couragous and dare to break with existing Java GUI development and try to push it to a new level. THe concepts in JavaFX to me are mind boggling; you throw in a few node and hoppa! hardware rendered graphics. You can do games and forms with the same platform. Naturally they must to be able to mix old (Swing) and new, but that is the case.

Now, is it all perfect? No. JavaFX also suffers from the JVM; it's big and even chopped into pieces it takes way longer for the JVM to come up than the flash engine. So ATM there is no replacing Flash when it comes to small decorative animations on websites. But if you want to go fancy full size applications, I think JavaFX has a real chance here!

But Sun does need to keep pushing now:
- mature that technology ASAP
- make sure the foundations are well thought through from all perspectives
- good support for the most popular EDI: Eclipse
14 years ago