I talked about how I thought Sun was drowning back when Chet Haase left Sun and joined the Flex team at Adobe. It wasn’t that without Chet Sun was screwed, but rather it was a sign of how things were going. The client team lost big players like Scott Violet, and then Chet.
Well, more heavy hitting engineers are leaving. When the CTO of the client division moves on (to Adobe again, no less), we yet again have a reason to wonder what is happening at Sun.
It is ironic that the exodus of talent has happened at the same time as Sun promotes JavaFX at JavaOne. As I asked people “How is JavaOne going for you?” at the end of last week I got a common response “Cool to see everyone, but I don’t get JavaFX.” JavaFX is a mistake in my book. I haven’t met anyone who was truly excited about it, and who didn’t think that Sun could be putting their engineers on better tasks.
When talking about the symbolic “Why <> instead of !=” in JavaFX Script, I was told “JavaFX Script isn’t meant for you, it is meant for designers.” Fair enough, but:
- What a gratuitous change. Designers somehow feel closer to <> ??
- Do you realise that you have THOUSAND OF JAVA ENGINEERS at JavaOne that you are talking too? I may have seen one designer.
- No CEOs of Sony Ericsson this year
- No Neil Young
- This keynote is about YOU, our developers, and everything we show in the next two hours ships TODAY
- In the next two hours we will show you how excited we are about how you can deliver world class applications on the Java platform.
Shouting about JavaFX is like shooting fish in a barrel, and it is easy for us to sit on the sideline and quarterback Suns demise, but what I find so frustrating is that Sun has a ton of assets. It doesn’t actually HAVE to go this way. Although there isn’t a Steve Jobs to come back and save the day, like Apple did (even if Steve didn’t do it all), Sun could change course.
I personally think it is time for Sun to be humble. Re-engage the Java developers. There are more Java developers than any other platform …. still. The army at JavaOne filters into the keynote ready to be inspired. They don’t want to feel ignored thanks to JavaFX.
Along with your Java army, you also have a fantastic platform that is deployed all over the world. The JVM is phenominal, and could be the platform for much more than Java the language. JRuby is doing great. Scale is promising. Jython. Awesome work, but lets put more into it and take it to the next level. Make the JVM the best platform for dynamic languages as well as static. Don’t through every dynamic feature into the Java language as they will split the community. Instead, keep Java Java, and dynamic folks can jump into JRuby, Groovy, and the myriad of other choices on the JVM.
Although people weren’t head over heals with JavaFX (and its non announcement), I did talk to people who were actually excited about the Java Plugin. Ken Russell is doing a great job, and imagine what they could do if they pushed there. The Web has won. Java could be a great way to push the Web forward. Instead of thinking about the applet as a way to draw rectangles, think of it as an extension mechanism. Using it for our Wii demos was simple. There is much exciting work that could be done here. My old “Ruby in the browser” work is not a lot cleaner with JNLP support, and JRuby builds out a JNLP package ready to rock and roll.
Use your power in the Enterprise. Instead of the current Java EE focus, how about also making a productivity play. Make Java the most productive way to build phenomenal applications. Come out kicking and screaming at next JavaOne saying:
Get people off their seats. Inspire them. Cull the bleeding and move on. The assets are in place, now it is time for the momentum to change.
NOTE: I talked about some of these issues in the JavaOne Roundup Podcast with @cote of Redmonk.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:53 am
The majority of the JavaFX backlash is because they have nothing to ship. Sun does need an answer for the client. With the rise of RIA’s this is only going to get more important, but engineers know when all they are seeing is marketing. Sun/Java has so little good will on the client-side that a huge marketing pitch just reinforces the existing negative perceptions. I think the overall vibe of JavaOne would have been different if they had announced that JavaFX was ready for the world.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Have the next JavaOne in Manchester, call it JVMOne and have Mark E. Smith instead of Neil Young.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
the JVM is just another platform in a sea of platforms… Java is just another language. I hope Java developers realize that. Ive been using Java for roughly 8 years (not exclusively) and I never wanted to specialize in it or take a job specifically with Java as the only technology path.. why ? because it will go away one day just like fortran did (sorry to the people still using fortran).
May 12th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Certainly seems like a poor marketing move to tell people you can’t do RIA in plain Java. And poor resource management for a struggling company – imagine what Sun could have done without the wasted effort writing, marketing and evangelizing a new language, compiler, debugger, code editor plugin, language documentation, etc. Also alienates the huge market of Java sub-languages: Groovy, JRuby, Jython, etc., that can easily call anything Java.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Perhaps they are leaving because they realize how cool flex really is… JavaFx is a joke for at least another few releases…
May 12th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Why oh why can’t Sun just put its weight behind one of the 200+ Ajax toolkits out there like Dojo, Ext or GWT instead of building a mediocre imitation of Flash?
May 12th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Somebody had to say it, glad you did. I gotta say, it is a very wide spread attitude among corporate developers. Why can’t Sun focus on a next generation Java rather than arm wrestle Adobe. Sun tried with applets, but sadly did not follow through. The only good things coming out of Sun these days (and that’s not even really Sun is it?!) is NetBeans.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Here is my 2 cents. First sun have to work out “what is java”, and I think they have lost it. There are 2 markets, consumer and corporate. And they have very different requirements. At the end of the day, they both need the same technology, but its how they use that tech and need it that is important. I think JavaFX is a good idea. It fills a gap. It does not replace the existing. What has been exciting has been the work of chet haase and roman guy. Their blogs i think inspired a lot of people to build cool stuff, and to show them that a lot of stuff was already there, if only people knew how to use it. ie. the extreme gui makeover stuff. Who is going to fill that role now ? Has anyone else notice the blogs on javadesktop.org in the last few months. Boring. No COOL stuff, and very limited update rate. Nothing that inspires. Which, if you are company like sun, should be your goal. To tell a great story to developers, to inspire them. Please, stop changing the core VM until the deployment issues are sorted, on all CONSUMER platforms, else it pretty much becomes a Windows only, corporate runtime.
Back to the earlier statement – why are their two RIA markets. Consumers and corporate ? in one, you have NO control over the desktop, the other you have full control. In one you have to deal with people like my mother (no offense mum, you know what I mean) and in the other you have IT departments supporting the desktop. Anyone that has done any real RIA work, will tell you how different each browser is not taking into account the os. I can think of tones of things I could do with the new applet stuff in jdk6, update 10 but… it only runs on windows. And I still have no easy multimedia support (not just playback, but capture). And I don’t want third party support – that only works in corporate world. I want native, that I know will always be there. So when I deploy it, it is available. I want it only platforms -> Windows, Mac os 10.4 and 10.5, and Linux.
I got excited about jdk1.5. For the first time, the jdk was looking good on all platforms. Then jdk1.6 solved the grey rectangle issue. Great, but it has only JUST happened on mac. So, for the last 2 years I have been developing against jdk1.4 and only been able to make the move to jdk1.5 this year. Why , because I have to code to what my customers use and I know will work.
Where is what I want (in this order)
a) sun, standardise the JVM as a platform. ie. a virtual MACHINE. take jdk1.6 and put the deployment stuff in , and get it on all platforms. And stabalise it for the next 2 years. When you do that, put some form of InvokeDynamic in and let it be.
b) You also need native support (the same at all levels) for rich media. ie. web cams, sound capture and video playback and streming. This should also be in a) above. How long can it take, there are tones of open source stuff out their. I want it to just work the same everywhere in version one. Other updates can improve performance, but as long as it is good enough, and it runs the same in all envs, thats what I want.
c) make all the extra gui, languages etc as “plugins”, no part of the core jre. This fits in well with the new update 10 stuff. ie. download extras from sun on demand. But it makes the jdk a platform again, not an every increasing pile of api’s plus a platform. The only time a jdk number should be increased from now on is when the jvm is updated with new op codes. That way all the cool stuff like javascript, groovy etc are “modules” not the platform.
For our new product coming out, we looked at a lot of tech – Java, GWT and Flex/Flash. We are a java shop, but we ended up going Flex for front end why ? . It worked the same. For a consumer product, we needed that, else support and bad word of mouth would kill us. GWText was cool, but again we found issues during testing. In 6months, maybe.
I would have loved to use the new update 10 stuff… but it was basically a windows only solution for us, what about the mac (which in the consumer market is important), oh, and it had no uniform bug free easy (zero) install , consistent rich media support.
just our experience.
side note – does anyone else think the javafx.com site is a joke ? On the mac, in playback, whenever you move the mouse in firefox 2, it flickers. Its like that a poor mans version of web 2.0. It doesn’t even showcase their technology, or maybe its because I am using a mac to look at that is happening ? which again might prove the point above. Why promote a tech as run anywhere, when it runs only on windows, oh and solaris (thats the solution, i need to get my mum a solaris box… that should be easy for her to work out :-) ).
May 12th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
I did take a look at JavaFX syntax and find its Java plus mark-up style quite weird if not screwy. I wonder why Sun doesn’t take the route of Flex and SilverLight where code and mark-ups are separate to make two clean layers. Mixing those two together not only loses the layered structure but also forces developers to learn a new language. Not sure why Sun designed it that way.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
What you said has some truth, but it loses it’s value because all you do is pushing your own agenda.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
May I ask you a question?
when were you last post saying something good about Java anyway
May 12th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Ah ha… but the real question is…
When was the last time there was something good to say about Java?
May 12th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
They should have helped Google to bring java2D into the GWT compiler instead of building javafx.
THAT product would be a competitive player in the RIA market, because the no-plugin argument.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Who is that CTO you are talking about?
May 13th, 2008 at 2:19 am
Hans Muller , of course
May 13th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Scott Violet, Chet Haase, Philip Milne, and now Dr Hans Muller, That’s the entire Swing and Java 2D team gone.
Probably the only person remaining is Amy Fowler. Or is she still there?
May 13th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Hans Muller? Isn’t he the one that let the java app framework and before that jdnc die? Going to adobe? Great! As far as javafx, its a start albeit slow and late. Flex isn’t that great either when you have to through proxies and firewalls for anything besides plain http requests. The jvm is what makes java great, and the client plugin improvements are why they need to make a play in this space. That said, they do need an evangelist. The biggest competition to adobe in the enterprise space is silverlight. Need proof? Take an objective look at the hoky native integration apis in AIR and think about the mirror in a mirror effect.
Btw
Btw
May 13th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Get a good blog following:
Step 1: Find something to bash
Step 2: Bash it regularly
Lol, you’ve got quite the following. Quite mystifying. Did a Java Genie destroy your family when you were very young or something?
To the person who thinks you can’t write a RIA in Java, ummmm, it’s just an improved Java applet engine, go ahead and write it in Groovy or JRuby, people already follow-up JavaFX tutorials with the same in Groovy.
To the person who wonders why Sun isn’t pushing more of a separation between code and markup, have you even looked at JavaFX?
To the person who says Java is “just another language”. Ummm, yeah, and it’s one with a massive market. I’m guessing you’re not very good because the first step to expertise is to choose or be thrust into specialties. I’m also guessing you’re not very good because if you were you’d realize that it’s about the idioms not the platform, so get at it and start getting reallllllly good at one of them. Don’t worry, you’ll get there, young jackrabbit.
To the person who wonders why Sun doesn’t just stick with JavaScript Frameworks instead of supposedly making a cheap imitation of Flash. Well, first of all, JavaFX is quite a different paradigm from ActionScript, very very far from being an imitation at all. Have a look at it or some other language with more functional influences if you haven’t. They are quite a breath of fresh air in the UI after JS/AS/EcmaScript. Second, not everyone happens to think JavaScript is the best thing anyway.
To the person who thinks they should just help Google with GWT: Not everyone needs to help make Google bigger than Christ….but you should, of course.
To the person who all about their loss of the team: Gasp! OMG! Wherever will they find more JVM developers?!?! Perhaps you’re unaware that JavaFX was Chris Oliver’s *side* project before he joined Sun. :-)
To the person who’s sure everyone thinks they screwed up because they’ve got nothing to ship: I guess you missed the part where they announced the media and codec issue getting closer to resolved. That has, in fact, been the primary worry point. But yeah, it’s helpful to complain about software projects not getting shipped faster. Those dang software developers, I mean, what’s up with all that _time_ it takes to write a new language??!
To the person who’s all in a tizzy about Sun alienating Groovy, JRuby, Jython, et al (might as well add into there Scala, Clojure, and umpteen gazillion more): Which of these pray tell should they choose? I guess they should just equally dole out the favors? Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, the Groovy guys are complaining about being ignored because of everyone else, and once in awhile the Scala peeps too. Is Sun supposed to hire *all* their developers? (New career plan: write yet another JVM language, Sun will then hire me, and if not I’ll be a good case-in-point for arbitrary slam articles by people who don’t use Java very much at all.)
To the person who’s wondering why o why Sun wants to arm wrestle Adobe…ummmm, some of us are rather glad to have an answer to Flash that’s open source. Not to mention, since when does hegemony by one large corporation suggest that other large corporations not try to compete?
I would keep going but I’m tired of answering fools arguments. (This paragraph is the *only* troll in my whole post. Fire away.)
May 13th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Oh, and before someone proclaims that Flash is open source, please go do your homework.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:07 am
“Make the JVM the best platform for dynamic languages as well as static. Don’t through every dynamic feature into the Java language as they will split the community. Instead, keep Java Java, and dynamic folks can jump into JRuby, Groovy, and the myriad of other choices on the JVM.”
Good idea.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Marcus, can’t agree more. Having used ActionScript 1, 2 and 3, I can say the language is ok, but the platform…
One thing I quite don’t get with Sun and the open source is how can they say “we’re dedicated to open source” and include a closed source codec in the PlugIn, even if I’m glad they’re doing it ? Another thing is the FAQ at javafx.com .
I’m not an open source integrist but I really see open source as a strong market benefit for JFX.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
RIA will be a major issue in the next years. Why do you think Microsoft aired Silverlight? I think JavaFX is a real good think, and put fresh air in the Java world. Yes, Sun had to concentrate a huge amount of strength on it, but how could it be otherwise with a new project? Is your message “hey Sun, never try to do something new, because we want our version 45 of JavaEE”? How could you possibly complain about Sun concentrate strentgh on JavaFX and *in the same time* complain that they are not really dedicated to it?
By the way, I find JavaFX is a really exciting technology. The demonstrations during JavaOne, showing its features, are very convincing to me. Full java video player, JavaFX applets which can become desktop applications with a simple drag’n'drop, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop as design tool (how ironic), 3D…
I think JavaFx will have a great future: it’s the only full open-source RIA plateform, it runs without additionnal plugin on almost every browser (91%), mobile phone and Blu-ray disk, and sooner or later, the server-side integration will simply let Flex behind.
Yes, some questions are still open, concerning the licence of video codecs, HTML in JavaFX applications, the promised design tool (no much news about that), but Sun has done great work, and will go on.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
And a work about the competitors : I think that Microsoft, as usual, will be unable to ship something useful outside of the Windows/IE plateform, even if they made much promises about Firefox on Windows, Safari on Mac and even Firefox on Linux (Moonlight).
And I’m currently working on a project where the client side is written in Flex (I work mainly on the JavaEE server side), and I can say: Flex is a great framework (even if migrate from Flex 2 to Flex 3 was not so easy as said by Adobe), but Actionscript is not the best language ever seen, and the Flash runtime is real shit.
The new Java offer (JavaFX and Java 6u10, with new deployment, media components and Nimbus) can outrun them, imho.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Java 6update10 and the new browser plug-in are part of JavaFX family. They are cool stuffs you shouldn’t ignore.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Look, the internet’s DEAD – no one uses the internet. So stop messing around with Java, it’s DEAD, too. So is Adobe, the future is TWITTER. It’s all about TWITTER AND SMS, if you’re not on that bandwagon, your career is OVER, do you hear me, OVER! Notepad and Javascript and SMS, that’s all YOU’LL EVER NEED.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:43 am
What? No blisteringly asinine cartoon?
May 14th, 2008 at 11:42 am
JavaFX is the wrong way.
I’m worried that Scott Violet, Chet Haase, and now Hans Muller left Sun. AFAIK Jeff Dinkins isn’t working on Swing anymore, and Amy Fowler has changed her focus too.
None of my Java customers is interested in JavaFX. They want to get their Swing UIs running. They are looking for Java desktop blueprints, for a cook book that explains how to address the everyday Swing task. My customers were excited about the JSR 296 (Swing app framework) and 295 (beans binding). But now it’s unclear what’ll happen to these projects. I don’t see Sun’s Swing strategy.
If you look at the JavaOne 2006, 2007 and now 2008 what have we got for Swing, or in other words for the Java deskop *now*? A cool demo (Aerith) in 2006, more cool demos in 2007, and JavaFX in 2008. All my customers do the “boring” stuff: editors, forms, navigation, buffering, data binding, layout. That’s how they make money. Who cares about them? They need a framework, better components, not animated 3D flipping images.
On the other hand, Swing has reached a quite mature state. With the recent rasterizer improvements in Java 6u10, Swing can compete with native apps. If you know (but who knows) how to combine a bunch of helper libraries, how to apply desktop patterns, it’s finally possible to produce Java apps at affordable costs. That makes me feel a bit better. I’ve recently published the slides from a talk “Efficient Swing Design” at http://www.jgoodies.com/articles that shows I try to reduce costs and how the UI looks like.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Karsten: you forget the new vector-based Nimbus look and feel in 6u10 (hello dpi-independence), tons of fixes in synth, new rendering pipeline, new plugin/java kernel (which swing apps will benefit from).
The 296/295 will continue to be worked on, with the goal of integrating it into Java 7.
And, sorry for the cross post, but I believe it has some value:
The platform will not be abandoned. JavaFX is based on Java SE (on desktop), so we will continue improving the JavaSE platform. May JavaFX features in fact require the underlying platform support.
For example – translucent/shaped windows, new hardware accelerated rendering pipeline on Windows, support for vertical sync-ed BufferStrategies – these are just from my area of expertise. Many improvements were made in Swing (JavaFX will use skinning and Nimus as the default L&F -> synth neededto be fixed/improved, which benefited all synth-based L&Fs). Some of these improvements won’t be exposed as public API in 6u10 because of the restriction on new APIs in dot releases, but they will certainly appear in Java 7.
Or take the new media API (the Java Media Components – audio/video playback support, with licensed built-in cross-platform codecs, and with the ability to use the platform codecs), – while at first it will be part of the JavaFX SDK (for the same reasons), will be integrated into core in Java 7 – and given the Java Kernel feature, it won’t affect the initial download much unless your app uses it (it’s pretty small anyway, around 400K – with the codecs – I believe).
Don’t forget the JWebPane (the webkit-based browser panel for Java, Swing-embeddable), it may end up in Java 7 as well.
The JavaFX work in fact gives us a chance to significantly improve the JavaSE platform.
Dmitri
Java2D Team
May 14th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
> AFAIK Jeff Dinkins isn’t working on Swing anymore, and Amy Fowler has changed her focus too.
I’m working on JavaFX Media, Amy is working on Swing and FX. Shannon Hickey, Jim Graham, Dmitri, and many others you’d be familiar with are still here working on 2D/3D/Swing and now also FX. Indeed, of the 10 engineers who initially started the Swing & 2D projects in 1996, 7 are still here working on it or related technologies.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:22 am
Jeff, good to hear that you are at least there.
Dmitri, I appreciate the work that has been done under Swing’s hood in Java2D. A new look, plugin, and media support is not what my customers need. They just want to get UI values into their domain object properties, want to persist a domain object in a background thread and block the UI. They want to understand how this whole thing shall work together. The JSR 296 is meets well what is essential to their business, and for almost all of them data binding is too. Moving Hans from JSR 296 to JavaFX has almost stopped the appframework implementation.
I miss statements about Swing, which is where I had hoped to work for the next years or decade. Where’s Sun’s focus for the next years? What effort will be put into Swing? I’m worried that a word like “abandoned” appears when talking about Swing. (What happens if someone tells you “Don’t think about a pink elefant!”?)
Anyway, thanks for speaking up.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Josh Marinacci from Sun here.
Parts of the original FAQ were a mistake and I sincerely apologize for the confusion it has caused. We have updated the FAQ to clarify that it will be open source and details will be forth coming. For a more succinct and official statement please see Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog where he says:
“JavaFX will, like all of Sun’s software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it’ll be released via the GPL (v2) license.”
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/rocking_the_free_world
Thanks,
Josh
PS. If you have any more questions please feel free to email me at [email protected]
May 15th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Karsten, I agree that the relationship between JavaFX and JavaSE platforms (and thus the improvements and the future plans on the latter) should have been communicated better. Hopefully we’ll address this in the next few weeks.
Dmitri
May 16th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
i’ve been playing with nimbus all day- its very cool all the scaleable gfx stuff, and swing is always a number one UI framework within java gfx. we are also looking at 3d, video and audio along with faster animation etc for javafx.
theres also loads of other cool things in the mix, java already has enterprise and networking rocking if you ask me. and you can mix java and javafx code so all that stuff if there to play with (you should see the mess i make) :)
there is some rocking stuff we feel javafx needs so we’re working on that- sun’s javafx, swing, mobile, media and and and teams rock, its a great times ahead :) stearing a big ship into the realms of design…
when it come to people leaving sun i don’t no much about that- seemed to always have nice words said about them. i just started along with some other cool new people. i met Hans he was a top dude, he’ll be missed.
May 17th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Karsten, really respect you a lot, we used your stuff quite extensively for a while, until we went and paid for JIDE. Where I work, were very committed to Swing. In fact, we’ve spent the past 5 years writing frameworks to make non-swing developers productive with it. But boy, boy oh boy, is it hard in comparison to other tools in this space, eg Silverlight/WPF, Flex, Ext, etc, etc. Even when JavaFX is close to done, what is missing is the application framework that glues all of this together so you can bind an industrial strength grid with grouping/sorting/search/validation to a URL in one line of code and have that just work. You can do this, now, w/WPF and this is the kicker: w/controls you can buy for cheap from a dozen vendors! The barrier to entry is lower, and I’m afraid the ball has been dropped here. I don’t know Hans, I’m sure he’s wicked nice. But boy, if I were his boss, I would have fired him first for not getting the job done w/the Application framework. In fact, if I were his boss now, I’d stop the whining about resources (I’m sure its happening b/c who doesn’t have enough guns ;-), and just approach the JIDE guys and buy them, open source all the widgets and make a strategic plan to push them into the JDK at some point (and stop wasting time on swing labs and time a handful of people put in when they’re not stressed out from their day job), take their application framework too, and accelerate the damn thing, NOW!
For goodness sakes, why not even go a further and pick one of the vendors who integrate nicely w/the CLR and heavy weight controls, so that we can embed IE into a JPanel with really nice integration NOW! Webkit, ok, but let’s get this done sooner rather than later and help all of us poor Java schmucks in the corporate enterprise space ;-). BTW, I don’t mean the “let’s communicate over sockets to IE” foolishness either.
Better late than never, but now’s the time boys and girls to push harder while the window is wide enough to make mistakes here and there without getting our fingers hurt.
May 18th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Chun u hit the bullseye ! , As developers we need rich components which are extensible and can be easily integrated into an application framework. Animation and effects can always be added as part of the look n feel. JIDE no doubt makes the best swing components on earth, although swing labs is good , they havent yet reached a 1.0 release which is frightening.
2 Things in my view could make swing awesome.
1: Rich Extensible components like JIDE(maybe purchase JIDE).
2: Integrating the netbeans platform into the standard JDK so that developers get a powerful platform to develop on.
IMHO the swing application framework was completely Uncessary given that netbeans platform already existed, effort could have instead been made to port swing application to use the power of the platform
May 20th, 2008 at 10:18 am
If I were to prescribe a remedy for Sun, give the high-quality Java web tech (Stripes, GWT, Echo, Wicket, Lazlo) more attention and official support. Also, I’d like to see more focus on practical data-centric projects like Pentaho (reporting + adhoc + dashboards + OLAP + data mining).
Alternate-language JVM stuff like JRuby, Jython, Scala, Groovy, etc are already getting all the attention, they don’t need more. The JRuby + RoR stuff is getting plenty of official support as well.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
What a load of bull !!!
I for one am quite excited with JavaFX. and is more familiar to all hobbyist programmers like me whom started with BASIC programming on 8-bit computers or MS-DOS QBASIC – or VIsual Basic on Win9x, for that matter.
FC
April 6th, 2010 at 12:12 am
question for Jeff Dinkins
do you know by any chance if the WindowsFileChooserUI.java has been updated to add support for windows 2003 and windows vista (and possibly windows 7) ?
April 15th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
It’s alright for some one to have a different opinion. Any average programmer can learn all of JavaFx syntax in one day. I don’t like anything proprietary because I am freeeee. And Java Helps.