Is the javafx.ext.swing going to stay around for much longer? At the moment, skinning a swing based JavaFX app looks like it’s going to be too difficult for a UX designer.

My point still being valid though, a lot of \”basic stuff\” you simply can\’t do with just the Java runtime. I don\’t really care if the runtime lives in DLL\’s or a big fat rt.jar, same thing. And the choice moniker doesn\’t really score any points either, after all, nothing stops you from shipping your own libraries with .NET or Flex either. Case of point, you HAVE to ship a JAR in many cases in Java, i.e. if you need basic smtp support (sending a mail) that means include javamail.jar or even javaee.jar.

I like Java. All I am saying is that the out-of-the-box experience or the rt.jar leaves things to be desired, This is especially visible in the client-Java//RIA space where not necessarily needing libraries matter a lot on the experience for the end user.

Well, two thing to note: I made a Swing WS-consuming app (which also communicates with a serail COMM port) in Java with the size of 300 kb in total (using KSoap, RxTx and Fat Jar/OneJar). I guess thats pretty slick then…

Second point: When working with .Net you must remeber, most of the needed DLLs/Libs are already included in the OS. When comparing let’s face JRE against .Net Runtime and JDK against .Net SDK. There’s not much difference left. And with Java YOU have the choice to select from multiple Libs for the problem domain while with .Net you mostly need to stick to M’softs provided Libraries.

Which in turn is a plus point for easier development though. Well I must commit, as a JAVA developer after coding around Groovy I really like C# after tried it some time ago. Well, after it all depends on your needs and your problem what to pick and what your company allows (forget this for private development .

For JavaFX: It’s not to to musch do download for the things included in the beta an its not too late at all as most developers do not have the choice what to pick and there will be some years floating by since RIA technolgies are really adopted by the companies as mine (although I was allowed to deveolop a release management with Groovy Monkey…)

Greetings, GHad

The problem seems to stem from deeply rooted architectural reasons in the code base – now counting 17.000 classes!
The philosophy of Java turned out to revolve around a ton of design patterns and reliance on external libraries over decent, but de-facto standard means build right in. As I mentioned, I\’ve experienced this only too well when developing client apps which needed to send a mail (1mb jar needed), or consume a web service (4MB jar\’s needed).

Whenever I play with Silverlight/.NET or Flex I am always amazed how things just work, they are great package deals. I do hope Sun can fix this. But given their loyalty towards old and deprecated stuff in the name of backwards compatibility, I\’m not overly optimistic in this regard.

We were having a similar discussion over at an insideria thread and Josh Marinacci from the JavaFX team replied as follows ..

“Yes, download time will be greatly improved in the future. The JavaFX runtime for desktops will be hosted at a single Sun location, meaning it will be cached once and shared between all JavaFX apps. Additionally, we plan to pre-install / bundle it with future JREs (exact details to be worked out). Remember, this is just a preview release. ”

Hmmm .. so until they decide they bundle it with JRE .. the first time someone runs a JavaFX app the download will be fairly big … this looks similar to the framework caching feature in Flex only difference being that the Flex framework is a few hundred KB .. while the JavaFX libraries right now are a few MB. I hope this improves.

Yeah the old code (in earlier versions of JavaFX) used to be simpler but with the whole stage and customnode thing they made it some what more verbose.

Mrinal

Frame {
title: “Hello World JavaFX”
width: 200
height: 50
content: Label {
text: “Hello World”
}
visible: true
}

I noticed this yesterday when I created a Frame in Netbeans,

stage: Stage {

}

still learning here … but I’m hoping that they don’t move away from the simplicity that was first visioned and they can stay on par with lingo that’s easily recognizable by a ui designer. Adding stuff that a programmer would only understand will seriously detract from the usability aspect and not to mention the ability to clearly see the relationship between layout and code.

For your sake I posted a Flex Hello World app

Flex Hello World

Source

Its not an exact equivalent since it does not have the windowing code for the Frame that is there in the above JavaFx app … but what is important to note is the readability of code in Flex because of XML being used to describe the interface .. I kinda like that although that may be just a personal preference.

Could you expand on how you found language restrictive? .. I presume that the solution to large Classes will be to break things down into smaller ones.

Mrinal

This said, I did make a demo application using a preview release of JavaFX. I started right before they completely changed their package structure, ugh. While there is a lot to like about the language (first-class functions, databinding built in), I found that it just felt…restrictive after a while.

Additionally, the larger an object gets, the more complicated the binding. To the point where it gets unwieldy. You’d think that the bind keyword would clean things up. Maybe I just need to play with the language a while longer.

Glad you like JavaFX. I’d like to see Flash given a run for it’s money.