JavaFX, You've Come A Long Way

@James, you have captured some great points about how far JavaFX has come and where it needs to go.  Although I dont see the iPhone idea taking shape any time soon. 

One missing piece point is effective marketing.  Sun can be accused of many thing, but one was not marketing to developers.  I recall when Flex was ready for the rest of the masses to use, Adobe used top Java developers (Thinking in Java author, Bruce Eckel)  to hold the megaphone and spread the word about the coolness of Flex/flash.  Granted at that time, the platform was halfway decent and usable.  I hope Oracle does a similar marketing blitz and push JavaFX hard when the platform is stable enough to be handed to the masses.

I have only one request:

• JavaFX (or F3 as it was named then) was invented to replace swing. Please fulfil this single promise, and allow us to build cool business applications (with JavaFX alone, or by mixing it with swing components).

We are Java developers, our clients don't ask us for cool animations, they are coming to us when they need business application.
Please serve your market first, before you go to another.

 

- Easy to deploy (java or javaFx)

- still better startup time

- Call javaFx component inside java-swing  (so a step by step javaFx can occur).

Thierry

 

You made a good point. My biggest complaint it that the tutorials (which, well, suck!) are not aimed at Java Developers but programming newbies. I'm learning JavaFX for some weeks now, and it is actually quite easy to learn for someone with a Java background.

 

What we need is a concise tutorial for Java developers, focusing on the differences and equivalencies of Java and JavaFX in order to reach those Java programmers.

 

Did I mention the documentation sucks???

I could be wrong, But I'm thinking that its just too late. I use Ajaxish web utilities and they render quite fast now. IE even has a canvas plugin or better yet chrome plugin. The era of plugins is over, sadly.

@Vladimir: very good point.

 

Let's add the mobile stuff. Some pointed out that at the recent Barcelona fair there were no JavaFX announcements (with the exception of feature phones, which aren't the main aspect of the market). I somewhat expected since I believe that it's 99% a business thing and Oracle completed the acquisition too recently. But the future of JavaFX Mobile is bound IMO to the fact that within the summer Oracle announces that it runs on Android, Symbian and RIM. If I'm not wrong this would cover more or less 50% of the smartphone market. The choice of deploying first to Windows Mobile has been the most unfortunate decision in the JavaFX area. It has been told multiple times that they have already the prototypes working, so it's just a matter of business deals. Also, Oracle need to complete the JavaFX Player that runs on top of plain JME - this would give compatibility (even though through an additional installation step) to the current huge spread of JME

"Powered by JavaFX" Are they joking? these reeks of last gasp marketing/doa technology. Once again, (even though it will fall on deaf ears), please give regular us java applets instant start up time so JAVA developers can compete with flash. If you do that, projects like Apache Pivot and LWJGL will take care of the rest. Anything else is a waste of my time - I have no interest in learning a scripting language; my js is just as strong as my java so if I'm scripting i'll be doing it completely in Javascript. I'll make one possible exception for something like Processing, but when I use that I code in the Java api anyway. I agree with Richard - the time of plugins is nearing to a close - they're at the point where they can render 3d scenes with browser opengl implementations, why exactly would I care about Javafx at all when it's the distant 5th place behind Flash, Silverlight, state of the art browsers, and traditional applet implementations?