That places JavaFX as the latest in line behind Adobe’s Flex, which is built around the popular Flash run-time; Microsoft’s recently announced Silverlight; OpenLazslo, which is backed by IBM; and of course, the ubiquitous Ajax.
It rides two waves: the first is the popularity if dynamic scripting languages among content developers, which are easier to use and designed for painting screens that can change on the fly, rather than building business logic. And the tooling is typically designed as WYSIWYG, to make it easier to paint screens than standard Java IDEs from the NetBeans or (perish the thought, from Sun’s standpoint) Eclipse camps.
The second is the fact that, while virtually all vendors support some dialect of Ajax and have banded together in the OpenAjax Alliance to design a hub that acts as a traffic cop for the hundreds of JavaScript object frameworks that are out there, at the high end of the richness scale, Ajax runs out of gas.
Yet, of the frameworks that are contending for Web 2.0 developer hearts and minds, the only one that is in widescale use is the more rudimentary Ajax. And with Adobe having gotten a headstart, and recently joined by Microsoft, which is obviously a big brand name for developers, the obvious question is, does the world need yet another Rich Internet Application framework?
According to Bob Brewin, Sun’s chief technical officer for Java, the answer is that the other frameworks are biased towards browsers. Furthermore, as the others don’t support Sun’s Java Swing controls, Sun felt there was a vacuum that needed filling.
Of course, then there’s Groovy, an open source Java dynamic scripting language with features similar to Ruby that’s maintained by CodeHaus that’s supposed to make Java even more accessible. But Brewin claimed Groovy is too generic and doesn’t have specific constructs for UI development, and it’s designed more for programmers than content developers. Also, there’s SVG, a W3C language that’s XML-based. But SVG’s XML is exactly the problem, because it’s Greek to content developers.
Finally, added Brewin, the other frameworks are too browser dependent and won’t adapt easily non-computing clients such as mobile devices or TVs.
Significantly, unlike JavaScript or Adobe Flex’s ActionScript, JavaFX Script won’t be based on ECMA Script, which Brewin again claims is too general purpose.
JavaFX Script will include the language, support for the Java Runtime environment (JRE), plus documentation. And Sun plans to eventually open source it. It’s supposed to ease GUI development by eliminating the legwork that you’d have to do in working directly with the Swing controls themselves. That would encompass chores like adding property change listeners to and firing events from Java Beans, adding listeners to GUI components, and then determining what events need to fired and/or handled by each bean or component.
The other half of the announcement was JavaFX Mobile. Intended as a complete run time environment, it will initially be released on Linux, which has become a popular OS for mobile devices. Brewin added that Sun might eventually port it to Solaris, it home turf, although there hasn’t been a groundswell of demand for development of a mobile Solaris.
JavaFX Script and Mobile are the first of what will be a family of Sun products targeted at Rich Internet Applications. Other run times for televisions, automotive dashboards, GPS devices, and set-top boxes are planned. At this point, Sun is targeting these as branded products and does not at this point plan submissions of the core technologies to the Java Community Process (JCP).
For now, JavaFX Script is being released as a preview form. Brewin said that Sun would release the script and mobile pieces soon.
Our View
With its engineering background, Sun has always emphasized developing better mousetraps rather than working with existing offerings that might be good enough that already have some market traction. That’s the only explanation we can see for Sun adding its entry to a crowded market that has yet to develop, and where other name brand players have deeper inroads.
For Sun, the more practical move would have been to align more closely with Adobe’s Flex framework. It’s not necessarily that Flex is an obvious winner. Although Flash provides an obvious bandwagon to which Adobe can hitch Flex, Flex clients are not widespread and still have run time shakeout issues of their own. Admittedly, most of the problems may not be in the framework, but in the way that developers, who have not yet mastered Flex, have implemented it (personally, we’ve encountered sluggish performance of Flex apps that we’ve downloaded).
Nonetheless, our conclusion is that Sun has another uphill battle on its hands.
