James Gosling: on the Java Road
Thursday December 04, 2008
After a lot of hard work, JavaFX 1.0 is finally out and available for download and play! I've been having a huge amount of fun with it over the past few months. Every marketoid and blogger at Sun is going nuts with it. They tend to emphasis using it for building Rich Internet Applications - RIA has been one of the big industry buzzwords over the past year. But I've been building regular desktop apps with it, and it's great. It's been really easy to build beautiful Solaris/Linux desktop tools (sorry, the Solaris/Linux release of JavaFX isn't ready yet, but you can suffer through using OS X or even Windows). If you're even slightly handy with Photoshop, you just sketch your UI with it, export to JavaFX, then write your own script bits to add behavior. With luck, a Gimp exporter will happen, although that'll probably have to be a community effort.
Take it out for a spin. I'm sure you'll have as much fun with it as I have.
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Comments [10]
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Some work has gone into Inkscape integration already:
http://silveiraneto.net/2008/11/21/inkscape-and-javafx-working-together/
Ismael
Posted by Ismael Juma on December 04, 2008 at 06:55 AM PST #
just checked the site:
- demos take tooooo long to start
- some demos are just broken
- the site layout is sometimes broken
- signature of some applets/application can not be verified
to some it up: very, very, very bad start for so hyped technology!!!!
Posted by ano on December 04, 2008 at 07:26 AM PST #
Posted by 侍ズム on December 04, 2008 at 08:31 AM PST #
Hi - JavaFX provides great opportunities, but after using the samples I feel as if I'm stumbling launching both webstart apps and applets. Speaking from a user-perspective:
Security dialogs don't allow me to remember that I trust Sun's JavaFX Samples team requiring me to repeat clicking the trust button for each applet (plus I still wince at using the word trust this way, I believe the digital-trust concept could use some refinement & right-fitting) I must click two security dialogs and one licensing / welcome agreement. This plethora of launchtime dialogs leads me to blind clicking "Trust" ... I just want to see the app so I click - the conflict of motivation (protection vs curiosity) is to me not pleasant. Consider granting Trust permanently on API access (ala MIDP and Flash) to an app recording trust via a system global registry later accessible via the Java Preferences app, and giving an option in the WebStart launcher and Applet embed tag to ask users for granting all permissions at launch, to >give the developer control< over the end-user's Trust-experience. The delayed Trust granting would give the developer an opportunity to gain the user's trust by demonstrating the app before they ask the user to grant the code restricted permissions. Also consider pre-granting permissions, it's likely this feature is already present and I am not aware of it.
Running on Mac I feel is painful and essentially not worth the while. Sun should step in and implement their own support for Apples or simply take over Apple's existing development to improve it. Firefox hung while running JavaFX. Java 1.5 was used by Firefox in spite of my setting 1.6 in Apple's "Java Preferences" app (aside: prefs app should be discoverable and worthy of integration into System Preferences). The "Fractal Trees" sample ran at 10 FPS drawing a meager 40 straight B&W lines per frame, and the particle / smoke demo runs at 0.05 FPS and crashes Firefox after a mouse click. Scrolling the screen with the Weather sample applet showed a white blank rectangle where the applet was until 0.5 seconds after I stopped scrolling, double buffering could fix this. Also in the Weather applet Copy and Paste via keyboard shortcuts did not work, I had some success on the Mac using Windows keyboard shortcuts of CTRL+C, but CTRL+V did not paste Mac clipboard, and the platform standard COMMAND+C/V did nothing.
Neat that you can do Screen Capture with JavaFX! Cool level of integration.
Overall I'm hopeful the security dialog system and the Mac support will be tightened up making the technology better and more usable. Otherwise I believe JavaFX will be associated as ideal for apps that must be foisted on people such as 'management consoles' rather than it's perceived target market of apps people are expected to enjoy using.
The potential for greatness is certainly there, thanks for putting out all this easy-to-code-with technology.
Posted by Nick R on December 04, 2008 at 09:51 AM PST #
In terms of speed, since I have JDK1.6 U10 installed, I do not feel that it is slow to start. The slowness is probably due to the first time launch of JavaFX runtime. The subsequent launch is much faster. At least in my browser.
Hope to see it runs on Solaris soon.
Posted by JavaFX Guy on December 05, 2008 at 07:56 PM PST #
Experienced all the same issues as the Mac user above, and some more. Such as animation stuttering (try stopwatch), and general crashes. The rabbit movie playback was the worst. I closed the browser and the audio carried on. This was FireFox, but Safari wasn't much better, but at least the Java loading circle appeared which helped fill the time...
Compared to anything Flash based, FX doesn't yet stand a chance. 15+ seconds startup wait on all demos, and then a multitude of security dialogs. I think someone needs to rethink this from a user experience perspective.
As a geek I can appreciate the technology has much potential, and I look forward to the next version! but as an end user I'd run a mile from anything Java after seeing the demos.
Although to be fair, some of the issues could be the poor Java support on Macs, so when is Sun going to take over the OSX Java port and get the fastest growing platform up-to-date with 6u10? Default OSX JVM is now 4+ years old!
Posted by Peter Bridge on December 06, 2008 at 12:22 PM PST #
Had the same problems - application not starting on Firefox the first time, but ok on browser re-start. Really should tell the user to re-start the browser if this is a feature.
Posted by Mark Souza on December 06, 2008 at 10:50 PM PST #
Posted by Recommended on December 07, 2008 at 12:23 AM PST #
I clicked on the link and it took "10" seconds for the widget/example to appear. Flash content doesnt behave that way. Even microsoft's Silverlight doesnt.
I am a java person, and i hate to admit javaFX is very slow, atleast for RIAs. But, it could be good alternative for Desktop apps similar to Adobe AIR apps.
Posted by anonymous on December 08, 2008 at 09:16 AM PST #
Typical Java hype...sigh. :(
Posted by stylesheet on December 08, 2008 at 01:28 PM PST #