JavaFX in the Browser: What They Missed
May 11, 2007
1. Applets have a bad name
Is it really hard to imagine this: you’re at the water cooler, and one of your colleagues asks you what you’re up to. You admit it: you’re implementing Java Applets. So the other guy just stares at you for a second and starts laughing, guessing it was a joke!
What I’m trying to illustrate here, is that Sun should have waited until they had the “consumer JRE”, and should have launched a new Applet initiative at the same time that new JRE launched. Call it AppletFX, drop the name, whatever… just get that bad taste out of people’s mouths. Which brings me to my second point.
2. They announced it too early
Sun probably felt the Adobe and Microsoft pressure in the same market, so the announced their thing ASAP. Guess what, they had nothing impressive to show. Sure, there’s JavaFX Script. Sure you can draw circles and make buttons spin. Hell no, you can’t use your mouse wheel in JavaFXPad (what gives?). I mean, where’s the candy? The impressive story? The leading vision? The cool feature? The great performance? As they say, you only have one chance to make a good first impression.
3. They forgot to include rich video an sound support.
People come for the bling, but stay for the platform. If you haven’t got the bling, nobody is there to stay. I didn’t hear them announcing anything on the subject. Did I miss that part?
4. Scripting is harder to read compared to XML (for designers?)
Say what you want about XML formats, but people got used to reading XML. Not a lot of syntax to look at, and easily toolable.
Sun is looking at yet another missed opportunity to revive in-browser Java apps. But they do have a nice alternative for creating desktop UI’s now.
May 11, 2007 at 3:44 pm
This may be more like what you are looking for:
http://www.jasperpotts.com/blog/2007/05/iris-video/
http://www.jasperpotts.com/blog/2007/05/iris-java-one-demo/
It is an applet-based flickr front-end, lets you drag and drop photos from your desktop, uses hardware-accelerated 3D, etc. But when I tried the actual demo, I couldn’t get it to work: (and the site is occasionally down)
http://swinglabs.java.sun.com/iris/
May 11, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Thanks Doug. Do you know if they used JavaFX Script? What I’m concerned about is the effort it takes to create such a cool app. And initial load performance, of course. Who will ever use applets if a page takes 10+ seconds to load? Let’s hope Sun’s “consumer JRE” will address that.
May 11, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Current rumors about the consumer JRE: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=45377
Quick summary:
- Java 6 update 2 (Q4 2007 – Q1 2008)
- 2 to 4 MB in size, lazy (down)loading for the rest
- Faster cold start
May 13, 2007 at 3:04 am
No, I think the IRIS demo is in java, not javafx, but it could be done in javafx maybe.
Actually though, javafx doesn’t have a real compiler yet, it is still interpreted like a scripting language, so I don’t think it’s ready for prime time just yet.
About the initial load time of applets, probably Sun is working on that, but also I heard about an alternative JVM called Harmony: http://harmony.apache.org/
that apparently is more modular, it would only download the parts of the java library that you are using, not the whole thing. But, like with javafx, that isn’t finished yet either, plus there is the problem that most people will have Sun’s JVM installed, not Harmony, unless it is light enough to download on the fly.
May 13, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Now let’s hope Sun will let Harmony use the TCK so that they can prove Java compatibility and use the Java brand name.
May 21, 2007 at 3:30 pm
[...] Now if only the guys at Sun realized what they missed. [...]
August 21, 2007 at 11:45 am
Interesting that I read both “javafx” and “Harmony” here :)
I just have the same opinion with you that javafx must miss something that it can not plug into web-browsers, while both silverlight and flash can do. I doubt if Sun will do something for it (Sun is so slow!).
Harmony is a project that try to make a whole jdk, not only jvm :) And a bad news is it seems Sun will not give it JDK. However there’s no topic about javafx on Harmony then (Harmony + sun’s javafx fails due to a few inner classese missing)
July 9, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I am evaluating a possibility to use JavaFX in web and enterprise applications that use a browser to communicate with clients.
Is applet the only way to host JavaFX in a browser?
My question related to the fact that applets, are not acceptable in web and enterprise applications for security reasons.
Vitaly