Java Can Be Saved

I wholeheartedly agree with you Jeff! Java is a great back-end development language, but on the GUI department it's an abomination.

Yes, Swing is a good library which can pretty much let you do anything you want but the curve is too high and you end up coding a specific component most of the time. What Java lacks is good tools to easilly make a sophisticated GUI/Webpage.

It almost looks like everyone at Sun thinks from a developer perspective rather than from an artist perspective. Sun tries with JavaFX but its still too much coding and less "clicking". If you want to lower accessibility to the Java platform, you better provide tools which make the entire development cycle easier. We have the frameworks (that's an understatement) now we need to make the art-pipeline more smooth.

This tool would look like Flash for instance. There's the tool to build a flashmovie with all kinds of features build in which let you do 99%. For that 1% missing there's actionscript.  This tool would like a Flash builder while Java underneith will be "actionscript".

If I want to make something as trivial as a JTable with a combobox auto-complete filter, I want it done in a few clicks. Not install a third party library only to find out it's not exactly what I needed and have to write the whole thing myself.

If I want to change the entire look and feel of my components, I want to click and import my own art, not extend components or overwrite global values which cost me significant lines of code and time. Nor do I want to constantly recompile and check out the results.. I want a tool that instantly shows me what my app will look like.

Sure.. Matisse is nice and all, but when stuff gets complicated where I need to define accurate placement of components to the pixel (what you usually do when you have a professional interaction design) it just won't cut it.

What about frameworks such as Oracle ADF:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/adf/index.html

Most simple web apps are drag and drop operations that build JSF apps.  I would guess I could take someone from school have have them productively building apps in only a few months.

Of course disclaimer, I work on the JDeveloper product; but not ADF directly.

Gerard 

From the top of my hat, Java adoption rate is roughly 80%. I can't provide a source but I recall reading it while searching google a few months back. Do note that this doesnt mean the latest JRE is installed. I recall most systems have 1.5. Anyhow the adoption rate isnt as terrible as you'd expect.

Rainer,

Thanks for your reply, I do have to call you up on two points though.

First of all JDeveloper is not based on a JBuilder kernel, this was true in the early versions which use the JBuilder hybrid IDE written in Java,C,Pascal, Asembler and chicken entrails*. Since version 5.0 of JDeveloper we have used a new tool base re-written in Java. I will claim to be an authoritative person on this as I have worked on Oracle tools on and off for over a decade now. (Yes there are some classes with similar names; but that is to be expected given the heritage)

It is also worth mentioning that the ADF components can be deployed to other JEE application servers / even just plain Tomcat:

http://blogs.oracle.com/dana/2009/01/how_to_deploy_a_11g_adf_applic_1.html

You can also work with over databases so you are not entirely stuck in the Oracle world with ADF. Part of the reason for this flexibility is that ADF is the basis for upcoming Fusion Applications which can be deployed to different application servers etc.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/11/database.html

You might find that ADF is interesting even in cases where you are using a different database and application servers. 

You will have to excuse my enthusiasm for ADF, I guess this seems like a bit of astro turfing on my part, the tools org in Oracle has been given on day a week out of there normal duties to build interesting ADF applications. I had never played much with ADF in anger to until they started us all on courses and I was pleasantly supprised how easy it was to use.

Anyway, enough rambling back to my day job

Gerard

Oracle JDeveloper WebService / Spring / SCA Lite tooling

* This was a nightmare to maintain but apparently required to get the right perfromance in a java ide.

If the adoption problem is pretty much solved the way forward should be in the area of rich interfaces. I don't see why we should create better tools to create Java programs that ultimately create stone-age artifacts like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's time to leverage Java's ability in rich interfaces (as well as serious client side processing). Better tools to create Swing interfaces would help, but that's already been tried with little success.

One area where Adobe's technologies outperform Java is in multimedia content. In order for Java to play catch-up successfully it is going to have to catch up to Adobe in multimedia support. JavaFX offers that promise, but the last time I looked at JavaFX it had limited connectivity with Java. Go Figure. Two steps forward and one step backwards for Sun.

For all of its problems JavaFX is still evolving. If it hits critical mass then we get back to Jeff's original question about making it simple to use. Java has to offer compelling solutions for things like multimedia as well as addressing the simplicity issue.

Jeff,

I strongly agree with you.  What Java needs is to be easy and fast to develop applications. Particulary I have no

complaints about the language syntax/semantics.  In my opinion the Java's weakness are:

- It's not easy to develop UI (specially desktop applications). Someone can say that JavaFX/Matisse addressed it, but is far away to be easy to develop. Just to compare, .NET developers just don't care about the code behind the desktop applications, their focus is only the business rules(OK, I know this is due to the strongly coupled of MS Studio and in Java you can choose your IDE... But should we really care about that?).

- Sun changes their focus all the time. They shoot to any directions. Do you remember the "LookingGlass", JavaSpaces, Java Metadata, Applets... Now they're coming with the new silver bullet called... "JavaFX". I really don't know any "serious" applications written in JavaFX, it's like a toy.

- Sun/Oracle should help more open source organisations like Apache. They know how to create great

frameworks better than Sun. 

Java is very good in the server side world, but it's very weak in the UI world, and as we know beautiful UIs(eg. Apple applications) helps to sell more software....

Cheers,

Bruno