Comments on: Enterprise vs. Consumer http://almaer.com/blog/enterprise-consumer blogging about life, the universe, and everything tech Fri, 04 May 2012 14:57:05 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Ray Cromwell http://almaer.com/blog/enterprise-consumer/comment-page-1#comment-38564 Ray Cromwell Thu, 15 May 2008 22:59:20 +0000 http://almaer.com/blog/enterprise-consumer#comment-38564 Dion, I believe that JavaFX is about developer productivity. The problem with doing animation at a high level, is that it is ill-suited to the procedural paradigm. At a low level, in games, you want a procedural metaphor. But at the high level, you want scenegraphs, triggers, event routing, first class interpolators. Consider the amount of Java code needed to use the Swing TimingFramework for doing nice animation effects vs JavaFX. Even ActionScript is not an ideal language for doing this. JavaFX is at its heart, a kind of Java DSL for doing animation. It contains procedural elements as well as declarative elements. The idea of including temporal list comprehensions and duration operators as first class citizens is amazing. Consider: x = [1..100] dur 1000 (let X take on the values from 1 to 100 over 1 second) vs a more Java/C syntax x.begin(1).end(100).over(1000). First class list comprehensions are nicer. There is also the notion of binding variable expressions together, so that if one of the dependent variables is updated, the other expressions are calculated too. Think Excel spreadsheet. I could write "handposition = armposition + bodyposition" and "bodyposition = legposition + feetposition" The point is, if feetposiiton or legposition are updated, then bodyposition updates, and so on, recalculating all the dependencies. This sort of thing requires constructing a master-dependency graph and doing topological sorts over all the dependencies in the program, and hence it is much simpler to do with a new language and DSL than to shoe-horn it into Java or Javascript. I think Sun made the right decision, just way too late to make a difference. Dion,
I believe that JavaFX is about developer productivity. The problem with doing animation at a high level, is that it is ill-suited to the procedural paradigm. At a low level, in games, you want a procedural metaphor. But at the high level, you want scenegraphs, triggers, event routing, first class interpolators. Consider the amount of Java code needed to use the Swing TimingFramework for doing nice animation effects vs JavaFX.

Even ActionScript is not an ideal language for doing this. JavaFX is at its heart, a kind of Java DSL for doing animation. It contains procedural elements as well as declarative elements. The idea of including temporal list comprehensions and duration operators as first class citizens is amazing.

Consider: x = [1..100] dur 1000 (let X take on the values from 1 to 100 over 1 second) vs a more Java/C syntax x.begin(1).end(100).over(1000). First class list comprehensions are nicer.

There is also the notion of binding variable expressions together, so that if one of the dependent variables is updated, the other expressions are calculated too. Think Excel spreadsheet. I could write “handposition = armposition + bodyposition” and “bodyposition = legposition + feetposition” The point is, if feetposiiton or legposition are updated, then bodyposition updates, and so on, recalculating all the dependencies.

This sort of thing requires constructing a master-dependency graph and doing topological sorts over all the dependencies in the program, and hence it is much simpler to do with a new language and DSL than to shoe-horn it into Java or Javascript.

I think Sun made the right decision, just way too late to make a difference.

]]>