May 8, 2007

Sun Responds to AJAX, Silverlight with JavaFX

Duncan Riley

37 comments »

Reports at Infoworld and CNet News that Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX at the Java One Conference in San Francisco today.

The announcement follows the recent well received launch of Microsoft’s Silverlight, and as an offering will compete directly against AJAX as well.

JavaFX is said to be a new scripting variant of Java with a focus on development for the consumer communications market, including desktops, mobile clients, and TVs. The first product release is JavaFX Mobile, a software system for mobile devices.

We won’t know a lot more about the new offering until after the presentation, however my immediate thoughts are that what we are seeing here is a game of catch-up by Sun. The object-oriented applications programming language that is Java was once the cool kid on the block, a base from which a new generation of applications would be launched, taking over our desktops. And yet it never happened. The new product, with its focus on mobile technology presents the potential of dealing Sun back into the application game in a big way if it’s well received today by developers.

Sphere It

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November 1st, 2007 at 6:56 am

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Jason Alba

May 8th, 2007 at 6:02 am

Oh goodie, another variant. More noise.

Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
Prisoner_No_7987

May 8th, 2007 at 6:12 am

‘Sun will roll out a Java-based product family’ · · · – – – · · ·
matthew

May 8th, 2007 at 6:31 am

to say that java never really caught on is ridiculous. i just graduated from cs grad school, where the two major languages used for teaching and development are java and c++. and yet non-technical folks think java sucks because it’s older than php. php is fine for putting together websites, but other types of development call for something capable of heavy lifting.
Tim@Todspace

May 8th, 2007 at 6:37 am

Maybe it`s now the right time for Google to buy Sun Microsystems ?
Duncan Riley

May 8th, 2007 at 6:38 am

Prisoner_No_7987
correct, it’s a family of offerings if you like under the JavaFX brand, JavaFX mobile being the first.

matthew
I didn’t say it never caught, what I was trying to say was that it never met the hype. I can still remember reading reports that Java based desktop applications would dominate the future: it never happened. This isn’t to say some good things haven’t happen with Java, but it was one of the most hyped technologies of a particular period.
Ed Burnette

May 8th, 2007 at 7:42 am

There are some more details now at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=306 , and a video at http://siliconvalleysleuth.co......fter_.html .
matthew

May 8th, 2007 at 8:02 am

yeah there was way too much hype around java. remember the java os?
pallet jack

May 8th, 2007 at 8:03 am

- Java is King.

- It can be implemented platform independent.

- To say this is a “Response” to SilverLights -
- Is rediculous becuase this takes years of development / therefore when silverlight was released 1 month ago, this was in the works for 10-20 months prior. Not a “Reponse”
mike

May 8th, 2007 at 8:38 am

Catch-up?! Do you think they managed to whip this up since the announcement of Silverlight? Obviously, this project was many years in the making.
rene

May 8th, 2007 at 8:45 am

See Sun CEO’s blog about JavaFX Mobile including a screenshot of an iPhone look-alike running the new platform:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where
n00b

May 8th, 2007 at 8:55 am

Will this be compatible with those Java rings that Scott McNealy used to hype everywhere? I wanna be stylin’ like that.
digginestdogg

May 8th, 2007 at 9:40 am

I still have my i-Button-based Java Ring. It is so geeky-cool!

Seriously though, I love the way peopel lampoon something based on their emotional view of an organization BEFORE anything is actually delivered (iPhone ,not JavaFX) Silverlight is NOT shipping and it is far from done.
And no one trusts Microsoft so adoption will be slow outside of the M$ fanbase (which is shrinking) because Flex/Flash is just fine thank you.

If JavaFX is ‘real’ java scripting as opposed to faux Java Javascript, then it has an opportunity. Competition is good. Bring it on!
JiveBay

May 8th, 2007 at 11:45 am

Even if they make a way for Java to load quickly the first time the browser calls it, applets are dead. Sure Java is great for cross-platform apps, or mini apps in the browsers. But the applet is dead, flash killed it. Applets were slow and a pain to build.

Flash has taken off because you can use some rather simple scripting and you can draw,build animations and make a UI very easily.
Zaid

May 8th, 2007 at 12:19 pm

#3
just because language x is taught in your uni class doesn’t make it a hot technology:) Java as a client-side thing never caught on. The packages are just too bulk and the applets too awkward in usability.

I do hear that java has decent tracton on the backend for intranet development etc.–but that’s a very small niche compared to the widespread PHP use.
Björn Wilmsmann

May 8th, 2007 at 1:11 pm

@Zaid:

Java is far from being used merely as a backend for intranet development. Nowadays, you will most certainly find it not only being used for delivering web pages (JSP) or any other server side stuff that requires high performance (like scientific applications, web crawling, data mining) but in client applications (Eclipse, applications based on the Rich Client Platform, just to name a few), too.

Besides, millions of people using PHP does not make it a good programming language / environment either. PHP is quite suitable for deploying simple guestbooks or even discussion forum software on your private web space, but for more complex, professional applications there are far more efficient and elegant environments to choose from (Java being only one, but currently the most dominant one).

The reason why PHP was such a success story isn’t really that PHP is such a good programming language, but rather that at the time when PHP became more widespread, the only alternative was to use Perl, which for a beginner not knowing anything about programming, must have been quite frightening.

PHP was quite successful in meeting the needs of the average web space user dabbling in web site programming and therefore finally got adopted by every consumer hoster.
me

May 8th, 2007 at 1:54 pm

What about the new Flex platform for Flash?
JavaGuy

May 8th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

I think people underestimate the potential of applets. I think applets may have a revival of sorts. Reason being is:
1) its a lot faster now, also jre is also only about a 10 meg download.

2)you can code multi threaded apps on the client side. As fas as I know, no
other client side RIA framework can take advantage of multicore cpu’s.

3) Hardware accelerated 3d through jogl. No other client side tech can do this.

I think the problem is people haven’t taken advantage of these capabilities, but someone will soon.
janko

May 8th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

JavaFx Script is not Java Script… it was “invented” by one man under the name F3 for quite a while… a declarative and functional language with some interesting structuring of gui and 2d / SVG style stuff… you also have access to all the java backend power

I find it particurally interesting that someone as big as Sun made such a big bet on something very very non-typical if you compare it to languages as java and c#…
Ryan

May 8th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

Go Java!
Nocturnal

May 8th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

I guess competition is great?

Matthew, (the one who just graduated from grad school), would you be able to contact me? I’d love to chat with you about grad school and college in general. I know this isn’t the right place but there really is no other way to figure out how to contact you. You can reach me at nocturnal [at] supz [dot] net.
Miguel

May 8th, 2007 at 2:54 pm

I tried the samples included with the JavaFX, and they all take about 128 megs of ram on average to startup.

Am not sure that Applet are going to have any kind of comeback with this sort of size. Well, they might come back, just to have the plugin disabled completely on the browser to prevent every web site from bringing your machine to a halt.
Peter

May 8th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

If JavaFX is to catch on, it’ll definitely have a lot of ground to cover. It’s somewhat late to get into the “rich internet applications” area, especially seeing what’s being done by Eclipse’s RAP, among others.

However, it would be wrong to decry Java as a worn-out trend. Far from that, it has matured into quite a successful language. Besides being taught as part of most CS/CE programs, it’s used extensively for backend development.
Alex Flood

May 8th, 2007 at 3:13 pm

Java is great, but I prefer .NET for everything except web page embedding. .NET applications run much faster, the .NET Framework is much more expansive than the Java APIs, and Mono (as well as Corel’s porting to FreeBSD) means it matches the platform-independence also.
mark

May 8th, 2007 at 3:17 pm

java is only suitable for republicans and drug addicts

i don’t see how a new flavour is going to help anyone
Peter2

May 8th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

Maybe it’s easyer to develop flash apps, but how many CPUs are there with flash opcode support? Nearly every mobile with java support has CPU witch can accelerate java inside (ARM) !
bdb

May 8th, 2007 at 4:30 pm

thanks mark, i didn’t realize my affection for tubes was java-related.
John

May 8th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

the whole platform independent thing about java is bull. Nothing is really platform independent unless the engine is installed on the platform.

The question is which gives better performance, better functionality, better UI capabilities etc. Flex, and Silverlight are proving to be impressive.
VS

May 8th, 2007 at 10:22 pm

I’d like to see JavaFX have a video UI element, then I would give it a chance to survive.
migatopio

May 9th, 2007 at 2:12 am

¿ JavaFX or Flex ?
Developers need good software for making excelent websites, we need a main software and we don’t need [b]new[/b] software every two months.
Didier Prophete

May 9th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

Well, let’s all take a step back and realize why Java never delivered on the desktop. Apart from initial issues with AWT and then Swing, the biggest hurdle in my mind was *Microsoft* itself.

They cleverly released their ‘own’ version of Java which was almost but not quite 100% compatible with the official Sun Java. With this, they achieve a few things:
- confuse the non technical user (2 versions of Java ? Which one is which ?)
- make it painful to download any Java app (now you might have the MS java VM, but you still need to download the Sun VM)
- kill ‘run once, run everywhere’: just keep it slightly incompatible and start added a few Microsoft Foundation Classes, and you will make sure it will only work on windows.

Here is a good article describing some of the legal battles between Sun and MS regarding Java:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaw.....court.html

Regarding of from which side you look at it, you might think this is disgusting or clever business practices. You decide, but at the end MS got what it wanted: Java is nowhere on the desktop today…

Didier
Vostok

May 10th, 2007 at 12:51 am

Ok Didier, I’ll remove all my Desktop applications working with SWT in order to follow your prophecy ;). I’d recommend you to query google about RCP…
Didier Prophete

May 10th, 2007 at 10:24 am

Vostok,

I am aware of RCP and other means of getting Java to run cleanly on a Windows desktop, but I think it’s “too little too late”.

Unfortunately, my post wasn’t a prophecy but more of an attempt to explain why Java is nowhere close to being a major playing on the desktop (at least on the Windows side. On the MacOS side, Apple did a great job in allowing you to run Java apps in a transparent way…)

I hope Sun learned his lesson and won’t fall into the same trap with JavaFX.

-Didier
Motorcycle Guy

May 14th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

I would rather go with flex than javafx. I just don’t see the point behind javafx really.
For real

May 27th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

JavaFX has video reflection capability. BTW Applet & Web start download times are virtually non-existent with the latest jre.