Flash Killers – Java FX, Microsoft Silverlight, Groovy and Xoetrope
November 12, 2007 4 Comments
It wasn’t meant to be this way, but I spent most of the IJTC talking to people about Flash Killers. Technologies that look good, work in any browser and are powerful enough to deliver enterprise applications with no installation.
- Dejan Bosanac, was speaking on Scripting in the JVM. He was kind enough to give me a copy of his book which (for the first time) has got me seriously considering Groovy. Maybe I’m about 3 years behind everybody else on this , but I get there in the end! Dejan’s book (Scripting in Java: Languages, Frameworks, and Patterns) is available on Safari
- Guillaume Laforge talking on Groovy completed what Dejan had begun. Ironically, I didn’t see the talk , but it was the reaction of the people that did that got me interested.
- Xoetrope (an Irish Open Source company sponsoring the conference) was demonstrating the XUI framework. Initially I thought that the world did not need another Java presentation framework. What changed my mind is that this has two edges – the first is the IDE – a plugin for either Eclipse or Netbeans , similar in drag and drop style to Visual Basic but generating clean XML Files. The second is that you can deploy on the Desktop (as either SWT or AWT/Swing), or as JSP / HTML. You can download XUI (and IDE plugins) from sourceforge.
- Richard Bair from Sun were talking about Swing and Java FX (more below). Sun is threating to deliver on the intial promise of Java Applets (Write once, deploy anywhere).
- Strange for a Java event, but Microsoft was giving out disks containing Silverlight - a time limited Visual Studio Professional with Expression Studio (inc Web / Design / Blend / Media).
(I’m still too traumatised by James Strachan and his Corba coloured underpants to talk about Apache Camel. And that was before Mark Proctor and Emmanuel Bernard starting talking about the size of their …. audiences 
None of the above technologies really solve what I’m looking for; Ideally we’d have a version of Flash (that almost everybody has installed / designers know how to make look good) with Java embedded in it (we need the processing power of the client). Think modern version of Java Applets. Realistically we’ll have to go for 2nd best as such a thing doesn’t exist.
More on the Java FX Stuff: James Weaver of the JavaFX blog was good enough to talk through these requirements. I came across James blog after reading his book (cover below). While the book covers Java FX and FX alone (but does it well), I’ve been promised a blogpost on deploying a JavaFX Script via Webstart. With that, and if Sun makes good their promises on consumer usability in the next version of Java, then maybe we have a Flash Killer. While Sun has dropped the ball in the past (note that it was Microsoft and not Sun handing out CD’s) the response times for the FX team for a casual query about Webstart (which is not their area) gives me some hope.
Dear Bruce Eckel : Hybrid Java, Google Web Toolkit and Adobe Flex
January 31, 2007 4 Comments
Dear Bruce,
First up, thanks for the book. Yes I’m saying thank-you about 8 years too late. ‘Thinking in Java‘ is what got me going in the language and in my mind is one of the best Java books written (sorry Tim). Giving it away free only cemented your reputation as the Bono of the Java world. OK, Bono without the Guitar, the Stetson and with a couple of overloaded constructors thrown in, but a man of stature nonetheless.
Secondly, I’ll forgive your flirtations with Python, on the basis that I’ve been having an affair myself with JRuby. I now understand the pain that you’ve been having at home, the endless repetitive arguments to get simple things done, and the temptation of a newer, younger, more flexible model.
So , I think you’re onto something here in your blogpost. I can feel the pain, the need to deliver Rich clients to users over the web. I think that Ruby / Google Web Toolkit / Struts 2 / Name your web toolkit has further to go than you may think , but eventually these ‘heroic efforts‘ (nice quote) will run out of steam. On the basis of your recommendation alone I’m willing to look at Adobe Flex, but I’m not sure if this is going to solve all the problems.
Now , a lot of us Java guys don’t like change (and as if you needed proof, just look at the comments on this O’Reilly blogpost on the Google API’s). All the same , we have a problem that gets worse every passing year. 6 Years ago we could have been sure that 90% of web sites were running Internet Explorer 4. Now we’ve got IE, Firefox, Safari (in all their different versions) as well as an explosion of mobile devices. The Windows Vista launch is only going to fragment things further with yet another platform to support.
No one web solution is going to display the same in all of these browsers. We’re not going to get a single solution from Microsoft / Sun / Adobe that everybody from developer to my Granny is going to install. So we’re going to have to take the ‘least bad’ route – something that looks great, but degrades gracefully to standard HTML on less capable devices. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know (yet) if Flex does this.
Yes Hybridizing open source Java is the starting point for the solution. Unfortunately we’ve a long way to go yet, and Flex is perhaps only inspiration along the way.
Yours sincerely
Paul
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