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Sun Debuts JavaFX As Alternative To AJAX

Posted by kdawson on from the YASL dept.

r7 writes "Internetnews is reporting on Sun's introduction of JavaFX at JavaOne today. Looks like a combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX with a friendly programming interface. Does this really spell the end of AJAX? I sincerely hope so. Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs. Proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in are also dead ends. JavaFX has the potential to satisfy this opportunity even better than did Java over a decade ago. Along with AJAX, let's hope JavaFX also puts paid to Microsoft's viral Active-X and JScript, and, more importantly, that it really is a web scripting language that developers can grok."

2 of 441 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Have they fixed the startup time? by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's the first instantiation that matters.. Applets are so uncommon that the average user will only come across them once per reboot.

    Also, because of the most stupid thing Sun ever did, people tend to deliberately close the JVM after that first initiation. Why? Cause Sun puts a stupid little Java icon into the systray. It immediately draws attention to the fact that the JVM is in memory and people think they might get a speed boost or something by closing it. (Or something equally irrational that users think.) This was a pretty predictable result.. and the icon serves no purpose anyway, so why bother?

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Startup times still slow, at least for the demos by caseih · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A demo of JavaFX (embedded in Java WebStart--yuck) can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/ . Seeing as flash comes up instantly in browsers, even if it takes some time to download code, etc, and that web pages with ajax also render near instantly, I don't see how JavaFX is really going to appeal to end users. The JVM plugin still takes time to load on all browsers and platforms and is quite big. And on almost all browsers and platforms I've ever used, tends to lock up the browser for 10-20 seconds at a time. Further how will JavaFX integrate with HTML? Javascript?

    Flash and .NET don't have these problems, mainly because flash is a fraction of the size of the entire JVM adn runtime, and .NET is always loaded and ready to go on windows.

    Anyway, given the current state of Java technology in the browser, I don't see this as being any different from WebStart, which everyone loves to hate because it is so clunky.

    I dislike the idea of Silverlight entirely, particularly anything that relies on .NET (mono notwithstanding). I really want to like Java, I really do.