Well, what an interesting week we had in the JavaFX world. It started off with Kirill Grouchnikov posting his thoughts that JavaFX is a train wreck. This created a number of threads around the web discussing this. At the same time Stephen Chin posted his petition to open source JavaFX. So much controversy, so many (sometimes anonymous) comments – what a week! For what it’s worth, I’m just reporting the news here, not endorsing or disagreeing with any of it 🙂
- As mentioned, this week Kirill Grouchnikov outlined his thinking that JavaFX is a train wreck. Quite quickly the comments on his blog became incredibly side-tracked, so he turned off comments. Because of the nature of the topic, the discussion spilled over into a number of other blogs, and for the most part was mostly negative.
- Stephen Chin has posted a petition to open source JavaFX. Further discussion is available here and here.
- The next Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group topic has been announced: it’ll be Stephen Chin and Keith Combs doing a live lab session where they will demonstrate the concepts behind implementing JavaFX Controls. It’s coming up August 11, so a few weeks away yet.
- Jim Weaver has posted a tutorial on the Sun Developer Network titled “Stylin’ with JavaFX“.
- Dean Iverson has posted some comments about his previous blog posts to fix up mistakes and misunderstandings on his part.
- Max Katz has done a bunch of blogs recently, titled ‘Binding to server-side context variable from JavaFX‘, ‘Using Expression Language (EL) in JavaFX to communicate with server‘ and ‘Seam conversations from JavaFX‘.
- Alex Ruiz has announced FEST JavaFX Compiler Maven Plug-in 1.0b2. This release adds new configuration options.
- Sergey Malenkov has posted about ‘localized reaction time‘. It shows how you can localise your application in JavaFX.
- William Antônio Siqueira has created LyricSearchFX, which you can run over at his new blog.
- I posted two brief screencasts to show off a TabView control I’m building in my spare time.
Whew! What a week. Catch you all again in a week.
Kirill is right about one thing: Oracle should pull at least two thirds of the ugly apps from the JavaFX site. Those apps are no advertisement for using JavaFX. They’re an eyesore. Spend some money. Hire some real designers to rework the samples section and ban all apps from the JavaFX home page. If I have to wait 30 seconds for the home page to load, I’m not sticking around.
I think the solution to the “30 seconds for the home page to load problem” is best fixed by addressing the root cause (slow plugin) rather than by retreating 🙂
Are you aware that you just made an announcement ? 🙂
When is this updated plugin out ?
Btw, have you read my comment ?
I realize that it hasn’t been announced here yet but thank you for getting rid of the wierd rotating sun-ray java plugin animation with 1.3.1. This new system is so much better. Also I think I note an improvement in startup withh 1.6.0_u21. I would characterize it as a 20% improvement.
I asked about this on Oracle’s Facebook page, and surprisingly received a reply to the effect that the samples at javafx.com were only ever intended to be code examples and not whiz-bang demos per se – but that they understood that good-looking demos were a priority and were working towards it. That was a few weeks ago now, however.
I also made the comparison between the javafx.com demos, and this:
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/
If it’s showing off RIA, there is simply no comparison at the moment.
Concerning the “JavaFX is a train wreck” debate, they all know the solution to make it an instant success: give it a Java syntax.
When JavaFX was introduced, Richard Bair kept repeating “you have to separated JavaFX and the JavaFX Script technologies” or “it’s Swing2 we’re building here”.
That would be enough to make me try it in my current Swing projects.
All we want is a cleaner, less inheritance-oriented Swing API, which JavaFX can be.
Come on ! Give it a Java API, add the whole SwingX team to the project and watch it grow !