Thursday, November 5, 2009

JavaFX: one year later

Just as JavaFX SDK 1.0 was released about a year ago, I was eager to give it a try. At first I was surprised at how many features and APIs were cut from the beta version that I had also tried. By the way, a couple of books had been written based on the beta version and I probably should now recycle those books because they have become worthless since 1.0 came out. I guess it was done to achieve release quality. Well, nevertheless, the quality of JavaFX 1.0 was no short of horrible. I personally had filed 3 serious bugs before I decided to put it “on the shelf”.

Later during the year I revisited JavaFX: 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1. I also tracked the bugs that I had filed – one was resolved, two others weren’t. Not to mention the bugs I filed for NetBeans plugin – it looks like they have their hands so full that NetBeans plugin is under the radar. It was also funny to watch Sun’s attitude towards JavaFX for Eclipse change from denial to acceptance.

The real reason I am writing this article though is JavaFX and Swing. Sun still doesn’t want to make JavaFX components be embedded into Swing apps although most Java developers would agree that this is a must have feature -- just read Josh Marinacci’s article on the topic and all the comments that follow. What Sun has been hiding from the beginning is that JavaFX is based on Swing, that JavaFX-in-Swing integration is easy to implement, and that the APIs actually exist but they aren’t published. Huh?

Have you imagined that there are APIs available at runtime but not in the SDK? Well, that’s exactly the case with Swing integration APIs. For a developer, it means that you can’t compile your program using the SDK but you can if you download the runtime. Many thanks to Michal Margiel and his colleagues for discovering it. Do you know another company that does such things? I'll give you a clue: its name starts with "Micro" and ends with "Soft".

All this bullshit is just inconsistent with the spirit of Java. I can really feel Marketing’s evil hand here. Is there a hidden agenda that we aren’t aware of? Sun’s VP of Marketing, Eric Klein, who so passionately presented JavaFX in his “Getting Started with JavaFX” video, started it like this: “When we were working on JavaFX, we were really thinking that there’d be three groups of folks who would love the power and the potential inside JavaFX. The first group we thought of was our existing Java developers”. See? He is really thinking about Java developers. Wait a minute, according to Eric’s LinkedIn profile, he joined Sun in February ‘08. How long has he been working on JavaFX? That guy, actually, is also an angel investor in a startup called Zoodles, which uses Adobe AIR as the technology for its rich internet application. This really stinks.

1 Comments:

At November 6, 2009 at 12:12 AM , Blogger Sergey Surikov said...

Sun still doesn’t want to make JavaFX components be embedded into Swing apps
--

Wrong. Sun want but can't. Too many people run from Sun to Google and Adobe.

 

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