Sun is releasing a new version of client-side Java insipidly called SE 6 Update 10 that sets the groundwork for JavaFX, a major overhaul of the runtime environment that’s set to debut before the year’s end and will challenge other RIA platforms such as AIR, Silverlight, and Google Gears.
Update 10 comes with two major consumer-facing improvements: a smaller footprint and enhanced speed. Whereas the current version of Java is a 14.5mb download, the newest has been slimmed down to 4.5mb. This will matter most for Windows users who don’t have high-speed internet access (since Java comes prepackaged on Macs and the difference of 10mb is inconsequential over broadband). Nevertheless, the move reflects Sun’s commitment to trimming down a technology that has been criticized for its bloat (many optional components no longer come preinstalled but must be added to the kernel after-the-fact).
Java apps will now enjoy shorter load times with a new quick starter tool as well. We’ll have to see just how instantaneous load times have become, but this is certainly an area where Java should improve since Java apps are noticeably slower to boot up than their Flash counterparts.
For Java to really take off on the web (as it was originally intended), it will have to become more developer-friendly. Update 10 doesn’t change a lot for developers, although Sun has reintroduced the idea of “applets” that make it possible to easily port in-browser Java apps onto the desktop. When consumers install the new version, they will immediately have the ability to drag and drop apps out of the browser. Developers that want to customize the way their apps look and function in the desktop environment will now have the tools do that as well.
These are just incremental improvements for developers compared to the ones that will accompany the release of JavaFX, which will support a simple scripting language called JavaFX Script. The idea is to make coding for Java just as easy as coding in Flash or JavaScript/HTML so developers don’t have to relearn too much when jumping platforms. JavaFX will also support high quality graphics (both 2D and 3D) and audio, taking particular advantage of Direct 3D on Windows.
Sun claims that Java is installed on 91% of PCs, or over 800 million desktops around the world. The company touts Java as an attractive RIA platform in particular because it already enjoys a substantial developer community and runs on a range of devices from mobile phones to TVs.
thank god i hate having to shell out 600 bucks for flash to make programs with . java all the way home.
inkscape + flex compiler + flashdevelop IDE or eclipse IDE = free flash development.
That’s how blabberize.com was made.
Your alpaca had me dying on the floor laughing
thanks to java now we don’t need any third party tools for RIA Applications
The only way they’ll be able to effectively make a comeback into the RIA space is if they support Mac’s as fully as they support Windows – and that just doesn’t exist yet. Apple’s doing the java releases for the mac platform, where Sun does it for everything else. Until they bring that in line, it’ll be a flawed stumbling attempt.
Apple has always been really, really slow to upgrade Java in OSX so as a cross-platform solution, this is useless until Apple come on board.
Flex/Flash already has >95% penetration and is way, way ahead of JavaFX as a client-side technology – Flex 4 will be released in the next few months. Also, integration with the Adobe designer products – Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks – is crucial in RIAs. More crappy-looking Java applets just aren’t going to cut it even if they do perform faster than before.
@silicon valley dropout, you can make Flash RIAs for free with the Flex SDK if you so desire. Not my cup of tea though, I use the commerical Flex Eclipse plug-in.
I couldn’t agree more! Don’t get me wrong, Java is THE solution for the server side, but under no circumstances for the client side.
I’d rather take a knife to the stomach than work with Flash/Flex again. AS3 is a pathetic little language compared to Java and makes life miserable for real developers who are aware of best practices.
Whatever they called it…if it performs the way JAVA applet did, they this so called “Resurgence” will not last long.
I just don’t see what JavaFX has to offer. As mentioned above:
1) Flash/Flex has: market penetration, integration with the suite products and is ahead of the game in graphics rendering
2) Silverlight has: Microsoft backing, first class programming framework (C#, .NET, Visual Studio), enterprise capability (WCF, SharePoint integration)
I see Flash/Flex as RIA for the masses. Silverlight RIA for the enterprise/business. What is JavaFX going to be?
“I see Flash/Flex as RIA for the masses. Silverlight RIA for the enterprise/business”. I disagree. Flex is as much for the enterprise as silverlight is. Silverlight is not quiet there when it comes to non windows based deployments.
Flex plays exceedingly well with java and .net back ends .
As for javafx, it might just click because java devs (A HUGE NUMBER) wont want to learn yet another language to do this RIA thingy!
“java devs (A HUGE NUMBER) wont want to learn yet another language”
Isn’t javaFX different from traditional Java? JavaFX is based on java platform n thats all with its relation to java, syntactically its a new n different language from java. So anyways its goin to be a new learning who wants to join RIA world.
@Venkat,
People say that Microsoft has a monopoly in Windows…that holds more true for the enterprise than anything. Take a poll of Fortune 500 based companies and a big majority of them are Microsoft-based. Who cares about non-windows based enterprise deployments if you are Microsoft?
Flex plays exceedingly well with .net back ends? better than Silverlight???? If I want to refactor code and move it from the client Silverlight and move it to the service layer or business logic on the web server…I can simply COPY AND PASTE. Can you do that with a Flash front-end and a .NET backend? If I want to develop a Silverlight RIA…I am using one language and ONE toolset. In Flash I have a seperate tool for building the UI and then need another tool for the backend.
Not too mention the fact people already familiar with WCF, WPF or C# are already 40% of the way there with language and design comapred to a Flash developer.
Throw in some other big facts like Flash can’t do true multithreading and you have a complete package of why Flash will not mature into an enterprise product.
A recent Gartner report claims about 75% of large enterprise applications are Java (server side of course) as compared to 25% for Microsoft. To say Microsoft is an enterprise standard seems unlikely.
What’s Silverlight’s install percentage? 95% like Flash? Don’t think so.
And last time I looked Silverlight didn’t even allow printing. Also don’t think they have binary data transfer like Flex’s AMF protocol, etc, etc.
They’re still trying to play catchup in a big way…
As for JavaFX, it’s been out for over a year and good luck finding anybody actually using it. Maybe some day…
Java applets could be considered “bloated” 10 years ago – and these are exactly the times when Windows XP was considered bloated (I remember people saying things like “oh, XP requires 64 megabytes of RAM! what a nonsense!”).
Today modern applets work on more than 85% desktop machines and provide a VM that is both open source and very mature. As for graphics – looka at http://www.bubblemark.com/, in most configurations applets are usualy faster than Flash even without using GPU.
Are you serious? A bubble animation application? WTF?
One thing that Microsoft has going for it is single language on both server and client. Same can be true for Sun if they do it right. Benefits are great – developers only need to practice one language, code can be reused, cost savings abound.
Of course given Sun’s record on “small”, “quick” and “unobtrusive” I am highly sceptical of this effort. Java applets have always taken forever to startup and their auto-update manager is obnoxious.
“added to the kernel”? perhaps a poor choice of wording?
lmao
not at all. it’s only your ignorance.
Java Kernel is a subset of the JRE. However, after Java Kernel completes downloading and installing the rest of the bundles downloaded by Download Manager, it will be identical (bit by bit) to a JRE.
http://java.sun...faq.jsp#JKernel
Flex seems to be easy to code and use and the syntax is pretty much easy to pickup. Moreover with ActionScript 3.0 it has completely stepped in to the OOP’s world.Sun’s move to JavaFX is anticipated by the java community and will be considered as primary choice only if its able to make things easy for RIA.
take away this javascript crap…..let javafx win in rich web applications…..javascript is so complex, only google nerds can program it right
More like, javascript is such a clusterfuck only google nerds can program it right. But hey, that’s what GTK is for.
doh! I meant GWT.
If they can pull off a good runtime there will certainly be some interesting times ahead. Java is open source, flash is not, neither is microsoft. Not sure about JavaFX, but I assume it will be as well given sun’s strategy.
If they have video & startup speed covered from word go, javafx will be a blessing. Screw flex & flash with all their proprietary tools. Open source for all.
What they need to do is update the fugly user interface elements you typically find in these applets.
Well, seems they did: http://news.cne...l?tag=mncol;txt
There are also some videos at http://www.javafx.com/ (click on “beyond the browser”)
Well though I agree JavaFX might actually succeed, the demos available on http://www.javafx.com suck. If this is what sun wants to show to prospective developers, I think something is deeply wrong.
Yeah, 18 months ago. Did you see the date of the post?
this updates sounds really great.
Put a nail in the damn Java-on-client’s coffin and put it in deadpool. they were supposed to release this 10 years ago! Sun destroyed the opportunity of a lifetime by fumbling Java bug time. Flash has executed on the strategy Sun had layed out for Java applets. its too late now.
Oh, I thought SUN is already in the deadpool…
I am surprised no one mentioned what an advantage having platform independent 3D graphics power can be.
Silverlight and Flash both lack that. Macs come with Java preinstalled and windows users on a broadband can have it in a couple minutes and you have platform independent access to hardware for making some really slick games. That’s the feature that gets me most excited about Java over Flash. I love doing work in Flash, don’t get me wrong, but the 3d solutions they have coming out like papervision and the like don’t have great mipmapping or antialiasing. And as a graphics programmer that makes me cringe. Flash 10 is supposed to have 3D support too but the demos show billboard demos of spinning phones which is not as visceral as a fly over of a terrain engine.
Flash has 98% market share on the desktop.
Java has a huge market share in the backend.
While I don’t have the numbers offhand, I know
that eBay and iTunes store uses Java extensively
in the backend.
Adobe approached the market from a designer’s
point-of-view and is now improving the computer
science behind its ActionScript language and VM.
It took many years to make AS object-oriented.
Sun approached the market with network technology
and a general purpose language (a huge scope of
work for any company) and a best-in-class VM.
It is now working on the design and aesthetics
side of things.
Flash 10 has GPU acceleration built-in.
JavaFX has GPU acceleration built-in.
Adobe is all about content creation tools.
Sun is undoubtedly aware of the need to
fill this space. Designers simply don’t work
with ’source code’, whether it is a script or
not. Designers work with visualisers: tools
that work at the pixel, layout and colour
level.
Eclipse is written in Java. Adobe has wisely
chosen to build its Flex IDE on top of Eclipse.
Microsoft also provides Silverlight 2 SDK plug-ins
for Eclipse. Eclipse is sponsored by IBM. I think
these count as a major votes for Java as a useful
general purpose computing platform.
All in all, I think the industry is making good
strides forward having big companies provide
good design and good computer science:
they are symbiotic, not mutually exclusive.
It is easy to appreciate good design (though
it has taken years to reach here) but it is much
harder to appreciate good computer science.
Good computer science can produce things
like efficient software that makes better use
of every watt in your laptop battery and that
I think is very important in the next 10 years
of computing.
We have 2 giants approaching the same RIA
problem from different ends. I’m going to buy
frontrow seats for this new Clash of the Titans.
.rex
Does “two major consumer-facing improvements: a smaller footprint and enhanced speed” mean “sorry, we have nothing new”?
Just to toss in my 2 cents on Flash vs. Java..
Our firm has put a lot of effort into comparing the performance of Flash vs. Java. We’re developing a web-based grid computing solution, which means websites include an applet of some sort on their site to connect visitors to our grid. We initially coded the client in Java, but then developed a Flash version because of the market penetration issue. In other words, we thought that if we had a Flash version, we would have more computers connecting to the grid because more computers would have Flash instead of Java.
This line of thinking had several flaws in it, as we found out:
1. Flash is at the very least 1/3 as slow as Java in terms of pure speed of computation. And this is with highly-optimized Flash code.. stripping out function calls, not using arrays, etc. 1/3 as slow! That’s pretty bad. If you don’t do much optimization, it’s more like 1/10 as slow.
2. Flash appears to be single-threaded.. across all tabs in a browser window. Which is ridiculous. So if one of our sites has a Flash video playing, our client would slow it down. That wasn’t acceptable.
3. Based on our log records, Java has close to 100% market penetration.. which is confirmed by Sun’s claims. So basically the only reason for us to go with Flash is invalid.
I guess what I’m saying is that Flash is great for small games and movie clips. If you want to do serious programming, ditch Flash (at least until they make it multi-threaded!). Java is the hands-down way to go now for serious web-based computing performance. (Still keeping an eye on Silverlight..)
You are right on Flash being not multithreaded is going to KILL them. If you go to dell now the standard is to get Quad Core computers. Flash leverages 1/4 of the computing power on the computer (I know that the hardware does some multithreading for u even for single thread apps).
If you research Flash and multithreading my Silverlight blog pops up #6 on google. That is ridiculous
On my site I wrote some aricles on gaining as much as 120% performance improvements by spinning up multiple threads for computation.
Don’t understand why Sun is still doing stuff with Java…Java has been dead for at least a couple of years now. After being out for a while, C# and the .NET framework pretty much made Java irrelevant in the development/software world.
Are you kidding me? What rock do you live under?
Seriously dude, you need to read more. If anything the .NET community is in a recession due to LAMP and the abundance of start ups.
Are you out of your mind? Java is not close to dead. If you mean on the client-side, and SPECIFICALLY applets, you may be right, but when it comes to server-side languages, C# doesn’t even come close:
http://www.langpop.com/
Just went to download the JRE 6update 10, and it shows a download size of 15.52 MB, not 4.5 MB as advertised in this article. Although, I could care less since I have a 10 mbps connection.
The end-user experience is horrible, deplorable even! No less than 3 dialogs are presented to the user, the last of which requries user interaction. And all this just to watch a “swirrly square” demo. Adobe Flash / Flex is a much better experience.
Java has a huge advantage in terms of 3d graphics. ALSO, java is built to handle multi core processing very well as it has a good threading model. Flash is single threaded crap. Java has a bright future now.
There are still a few of us coding client side Java
Our next generation dating site is a Java applet;
Check it out here – http://socialbang.com/go (no sign up needed)
Browser based Java can recover, but Sun needs to get the development tools and presentation right for JavaFX
As for Java being pre-installed on OSX, that’s an ancient version. Apple has only just released Java 1.6_07 a few weeks ago, and it’s ONLY for 64bit machines.
wow… sun is releasing a new framework for java applets? wtf would anyone writing apps/widgets/applets for today’s Internet care?
ah, so that would explain why eclipse sucks so bad….it is a java app! slow, resource hungry, outdated ui…makes perfect sense now.
give me a break with the dotm w/re2 java being “the” enterprise language. the language is nice, no doubt about that. the jvm/jre and all the other “baggage” that goes with it makes it so much more unpleasant.
just because java has now become the “lowest common denominator” of programming languages does not, in any way, make it a “good thing” – look at pascal…. (lot of that being used in “modern” technologies eh?)
JavaFX on the front sounds interesting, but it has a while to go to catch up. Maybe it can in a year. The Flex-Java integration with BlazeDS is really good. I would assume that MS will have good .NET integration so javaFX better play nice with Java back ends too. Flex has tons of component libraries and out there armies of blue haired designer types that make things look cool using Adobe products. So basically, I think Sun is doing the right thing, but they are a little late to the party unless MS and Adobe totally fall over. I can see JavaFX gaining traction in computationally expensive apps that need the leverage the Java VM. Maybe in research, universities, and large companies. Either way it will be fun to watch.
I first knew Java back in 1998, when it was supposed to be an applet language, cross platform. I worked at an Apple dealer back then, so I made a Java applet. I got disappointed, because Java Applet was not cross platform. Then come JSP, and the plumbing between apache and tomcat was too clumsy. I think the winners in web applications are:
- PHP for the server side (facebook is a good sample)
- Flash for RIA
- VB6 and .NET for corporate developers
- MSVC for commercial developers.
- Adobe suite for designers…
Martin
It’s obviously important to keep RIA market penetration in mind. Looks like java is picking up support though:
http://www.stat...wl.com/java.php