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Can JavaFX Compete?

Posted by editor on May 5, 2009 at 8:54 AM EDT

Sun's Joshua Marinacci, who works on the development of JavaFX, was recently interviewed by Scott Hanselman, in a podcast titled "JavaFX and the Web's Four Virtual Machines" (see today's lead Java Today story). Within the Java community itself, JavaFX certainly gets a lot of attention. A reasonable question, however, is: what chance does this new technology have for widespread adoption given the established strength of competing technologies?

A look at the Google Trends graph for JavaFX shows a recent significant increase in search levels, starting with the December 4, 2008 Slashdotted story "Sun Releases JavaFX" and stories that covered the news elsewhere.

Back then, some were quite skeptical about the possibilities for eventual widespread adoption of JavaFX. For example, in the CNET article "With JavaFX, Sun seeks new coders, new revenue", Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice said:

"I would like to think there's a role for Java on the client, but it's very late."

Eunice believes the incumbent players have an edge: JavaScript has matured as an interface language, Flash has many loyal developer fans, and Silverlight is powerful.

Indeed, the Google Trends plot for JavaFX, Silverlight shows a considerable lead for Silverlight in search volume; but it also suggests that after an initial surge of interest following Silverlight's release, interest in the technology may have plateaued. Look at the search trends for JavaFX, Silverlight, Flash, and you see that the mountain both JavaFX and Silverlight have to scale to overtake Flash is substantial indeed.

Still, time may be on the side of JavaFX. Ten years ago, who would have thought HP would today be selling the HP Mini 1120NR Netbook with Mobile Internet, designed to facilitate Internet access for activities such as email, IM, video chat (built-in camera), social networking, listening to music, doing homework, etc. (the seemingly perfect little box for many teens, college students, or on-the-road business people whos work is primarily Web- and/or document-centric)? The HP Mini 1120NR runs a tailored version of Ubuntu Linux! Can/will Linux someday displace Windows, or at least strongly compete, on the desktop? I'd say the HP Mini 1120NR certainly suggests that possibility. At a $329 price tag, there's not much room for pricey operating systems...

So, time may be on the side of JavaFX, provided that its development continues to warrant statements like James Sugrue recently made in his blog post "JavaFX: I'm Starting To Believe":

It always takes some time for new technologies to prove themselves, and JavaFX is no different. It still gets more than it's fair share of bad press, but as more examples using JavaFX appear, I'm starting to believe that it has it's place for Java developers.

Anyway, the history of JavaFX is quite brief at the moment. In Scott Hanselman's podcast interview of Joshua Marinacci you'll find the current perspective of a JavaFX insider, who's well aware of the competition, but who also sees the strengths and potential of JavaFX more clearly than almost anyone else can.

In Java Today, Scott Hanselman interviews Sun's Joshua Marinacci in a podcast on the topic JavaFX and the Web's Four Virtual Machines: "In this episode Scott talks to Joshua Marinacci from Sun, a Staff Engineer working on JavaFX. JavaFX, along with Flash and Silverlight battle to be The VM for the Web. We chat about how JavaFX approaches things and muse on who will win the web."

Peligri reports on A Hudson Release Milestone and New CLI with Groovy Support: "Two weeks ago Hudson reached release 1.300 (yep, three hundred releases, and the latest is already 1.303!) and Kohsuke wrote a short Commemoration Post summarizing some of the accomplishments. By all metrics the project is doing very well: I'll argue that Hudson is now the leading CI tool, the traffic on USERS@Hudson is over 1200/month and the project is very well grounded in the community with over 140 committers..."

And Kirill Grouchnikov writes about Translucent and shaped windows in JDK 7: "The latest weekly drop of JDK 7 (b57) has finally exposed the functionality of translucent and shaped windows as publicly supported APIs on the java.awt.Window class. Bug 6802853 has tracked the progress of exposing these APIs previously available in 6u10+ in the internal com.sun.awt.AWTUtilities class, and it's time to update the examples to use the new public APIs..."

In today's Weblogs, Alexander Potochkin informs us that JDK 7 is moving forward!: "Java desktop team is working hard to move JDK7 forward. I am happy to announce that Nimbus Look and Feel has been forward ported to JDK 7. Among all other changes, the latest build #b57 contains the fix for 6591875: Nimbus Swing Look and Feel. It is a real pleasure to see the Nimbus LaF under "javax.swing.plaf" package..."

Sebastien Dionne reports on his recent efforts to Enhance DisplayTag: "I did some enhancements to DisplayTag. You can start by reading my previous post on DisplayTag. There were some features that I needed and Displaytag didn't have them. I took the source code and I did it. The enchancements are not in Displaytag trunk, you will have to take my build or add it your self to the trunk. I didn't see recent activities on DisplayTag, but I would like to see them sometime to the repository. Now.. what are theses enhancements..."

And Sahoo provides instructions on Using filesystem operations to manage OSGi bundles in GlassFish: "I have intergrated Felix FileInstall bundle in GlassFish and here I will show you how you can deploy/undeploy OSGi bundles by copying/removing your bundles to/from a designated directory. A few days back, Jerome blogged about how to deploy OSGi bundles in GlassFish using "asadmin deploy --type=osgi" command. In his blog, he also mentioned why you should not copy your bundles to glassfish/modules directory..."

This week's java.net Poll asks: "Which device will people use most to connect to the Internet five years from now?" Voting is open through Thursday, May 7.

This week's Spotlight is The java.net JavaOne 2009 Twitter Network. I wrote this. In it, I'm requesting that people who will be at JavaOne post their Twitter addresses as a comment to my post, so that people who cannot be at JavaOne this year (and there are a lot of people who wish they could attend, but can't) will be able to follow the events as they happen. If you'll be at JavaOne this year, please post your Twitter address, so we can keep everyone who wants to follow the conference well-informed.

In the Forums, kbohnenberger has questions about about the open mq resend delay and resend limit: "Can you set the reply delay and reply limit on open mq? For example, I have a jms subscriber listening to a queue. The subscriber gets the message but something bad happens and an exception gets thrown back to open MQ. What seems to happen out of the box is that a nasty loop takes place. The client throws an exception, the servers resends the message and so on. Other JMS servers I';ve used have the idea of a resend delay and resend limit. So in my case, once openMQ got an exception back from the JMS subscriber, openMQ would wait for resend delay amount of time, then resend the message. If exceptions continued to get thrown by the JMS subscriber..."

neighbour is seeing a regular JVM crash with si_signo=SIGBUS: si_errno=Not enough space: "We've been facing the problem of JVM crash which is reproduced usually in 12 - 24 hours. This happens on Solaris/T1 and Solaris/Opteron hardware. The environment is: - JDK1.6.0_13, Solaris, Sun-Fire-T1000 (1 CPU, 1 GHz, 8 cores); - JDK1.6.0_13, Solaris, Sun-Fire X4200 (2 CPU, 2.2 GHz, dual core AMD Opteron 275). Unfortunately, we are not able yet to localize the bug (or the cause of the bug) and provide a simple test which reproduces the problem. But probably hs_err_pid*.log files in the attachment will provide some clue. I've found only one bug in the SUN bug DB similar to this one... "

And Shai Almog has an unfortunate situation, wherein Re: Focus problems are in love with me....HELP!: "I'm not entirely sure I understand the problem so let me try to rephrase that: When you scroll sideways you have some information which isn't focusable and when you return to your leftmost column you would like to be able to see that information. If this is the problem this is probably a bug in LWUIT, we have such as "trick" for the vertical scrolling (so you will see the form title when scrolling up) but we might not have such a solution for sideways scrolling. If this is the issue please file an issue within the issue tracker so we can follow the fix for this..."

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Sun's Joshua Marinacci, who works on the development of JavaFX, was recently interviewed by Scott Hanselman, in a podcast titled "JavaFX and the Web's Four Virtual Machines"...
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Comments

by geekycoder - 2009-05-06 19:16

To the developer, one critical factor for success of JavaFX is the support from major IDEs like Intellij and commerical plug-in support like Instantiation of WindowBuilder's fame. Even though JavaFX touts itself as the designer's tool, the initial uptake I believe is still the Java developers that is needed to create momentum. It is not too late for JavaFX though. Netbean, Intellij and Eclipse are still innovative and powerful IDE for Java developers and JavaFX's intuitive development might still retain Java developer, and the fact that JavaFX is able to run as class rather than from single large JAR file is useful for development compare to its competitors. I have to agree that there is still lot of catching up with competitors' offerings.

by fachim - 2009-05-20 03:57

I am not predicting the future, but it can be seen today and how Sun's commitment, community to fully support and another technical factors. I believe, how it broadly improved, used and supported is the success key of JavaFX.