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Posted by editor on December 2, 2008 at 7:58 AM PST

The know-it-alls originally slammed Java too

Plenty of bloggers and pundits have offered their opinions on the soon-to-be-released JavaFX, many of them doubting its prospects. Chris Oliver, whose F3 project gave JavaFX its starting point, blogged last week that with Thursday's expected release, now you can judge for yourself.

Simon Morris has seen the punditry down on Java before, as he reminds us in his blog No Future In Java of C++ programmers posting to USENET newsgroups that Java was pointless and doomed:

A lot of programmers just didn't get it — but then, why would they? They had a lot invested in their current tools, and C++ (Fortran, BASIC, whatever) was serving their needs just fine. The newfangled World Wide Web may have been a fun distraction, but it wasn't likely to change the programming landscape, was it..?

And today?

There are indeed some similarities between the early days of Java and JavaFX: JFX, like Java, will be launched in the face of a well established (and entrenched) opposition, and doesn't truly innovate so much as integrate and focus established but less visible ideas into a tool suited for solving a particular type of problem.

Simon says that JavaFX's key advantage is its interoperability with Java and its broad and deep collection of high-quality libraries, which the developer can employ on the server, the client, between the two, or any combination thereof.

Are the critics accounting for that? Or does the critcism go any deeper than "we already have Flash"? Like Chris says, we'll find out soon enough.

Also in today's Weblogs Terrence Barr looks ahead to the release from a mobile perspective, in Coming on Thursday: JavaFX 1.0 including FX Mobile prerelease. "So, what about mobile, then, you ask? Well, JavaFX 1.0 will not only contain the JavaFX SDK and runtime for browsers and desktops as well as tools but also a prelease version of the FX Mobile runtime. This is very cool stuff ... the unified JavaFX development model and tool chain allows you to create applications for desktop, the browser, and mobile (and later, TV) based on the same, unmodified code and deploy and run across different platforms with the touch of a button."

Switching to tutorial mode, Jim Driscoll offers JSF 2.0: The Switchlist example. "You've seen this component before: two lists, with buttons that let you move options from one list to the other. We'll use this example for our next few blog posts looking at JSF 2.0 features."

In Java Today, Mark Reinhold's Big Think build-up continues in The Modular Java Platform, which continues a train of thought addressing the problems of The massive, monolithic JDK and Packaging Java code. "Connecting the dots Given a modularized JDK and a modularized application, the next logical step is to arrange for the application’s modules to declare dependences upon just the JDK modules that it requires. This would enable a capable native package manager such as rpm or apt to download and install just the JDK modules that are needed to run the application. This would also enable a next-generation Java Kernel to download, initially, just the application and JDK modules needed to start the application. "

The latest edition, issue 185 of the JavaTools Community Newsletter is out, with a reminder about the recent release of NetBeans 6.5, tool-related news from around the web, new tools in the community, and a Tool Tip on building GWT applications with Maven

A new article on TheServerSide contains some interesting Pondering About JSR-315, the New Servlet 3.0 Specification. "The new specification for Servlets 3.0 is coming, and Roy van Rijn takes a good look at it. He sees some good things, but also something that makes him want to stand up and make an alternative proposal. Here it is."

In today's Forums, arkalon is looking for some Phoneme JSR120 datagram description docs. "I'm using the Phoneme to to simulate sms communication from my app to our sever. What I want to do is to do is to have the emulator to send sms to our server and then I reply back correctly. I managed to make the emulator to send a datagram request to our server so that's all fine. My problem is that there is no documentation at all about how the messages are constructed at the datagram level. So I have no idea what I should reply, if there is any handshakes or such. I could always wireshark the whole thing but I was hoping someone know a doc about it or point me to the correct classes where I can read the code that handles the messages so I can make out the conversations from there."

kleopatra reports on some layout fixups in Re: MultiSplitLayout and JXMultiSplitPane questions... "Just committed two visual test methods in JXMultiSplitPaneIssues. Both have an action to replace a component in the multiLayout (the upper right in the example), one revalidates as usual, the other uses layoutByWeight. Expected ideal (could be my misconception, of course) behaviour is to not change any child sizes in both. But then, the one with a revalidate might change a bit because the contained component is different, so might have a bit of different pref size. The other should keep the relative size constant - but doesn't always: sometimes (initially and after having resized the frame) the replaced container doesn't quite fill its slot."

Chris Campbell relates some Java2D history in Re: [JAVA2D] Poor performance of Java2D. "Yeah, we've experimented with native multisampling (in the OGL-based Java 2D pipeline, mainly) periodically over the past 5 or 6 years. In the earlier days, both performance and quality of hardware multisampling were very poor and as such it wasn't worth considering. Since then, performance has improved quite a bit, but as Clemens said, quality is still quite poor by our standards, even with e.g. 8x multisampling. The quality of hardware multisampling has generally been too poor to consider exposing even a "quick-and-dirty" mode, although that would make an interesting OpenJDK research project if anyone's up for the challenge."

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The know-it-alls originally slammed Java too
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