JavaOne opens today and it’ll be interested to hear more about this renewed interest of Sun in Java on the client. While James Gosling and Rich Green have already given some details on JavaFX in the InfoWorld publication, I’d like to hear more technical details rather than marketecture.
So far, based on the available info, I can see that JavaFX is announced as an alternative to AJAX. One day JavaFX may start competing with Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. JavaFX will appeal to enterprise “Java-Or-Die” developers just because it’ll run on JVM. As to consumer facing applications, I do not expect any serious competition to Flex or Silverlight unless the following two issues will be resolved:
1. Sun or someone else will come up with a way to eliminate the install process of the JVM that will be needed to run JavaFX on the client – any trucker from Alabama should be able to install it, and the process should be as simple as with Flash Player today.
2. The size of the JVM should become substantially smaller. Today’s JVM is 16MB, while Flash 9 weighs 1.2Mb, and Silverlight’s Dynamic Language Runtime is about 4MB.
Overall, renewed attention to Java on the client is great news and I’m looking forward to see a technical presentation of JavaFX in action.
Yakov Fain