Mrinal Wadhwa » JavaFX

What is an RIA?

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 06:37:21 +0000

After a lot of convincing, Abesh got me to start writing at SAP Network Blogs … as part of my introductory post I ended up describing what I thought the term RIA meant and I later realized I had never documented my interpretation of Rich Internet Applications so here’s what I said in the SDN post ..

What are Rich Internet Applications? .. while there are many definitions on the web, I like to decide if something is an RIA or not based on the following criteria …

It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.

Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).

It should offer a user experience that is Richer than what we’ve been used to in the past in a particular environment.

If a piece of software satisfies the above criteria, in my opinion, its an RIA. If you think about these points for a little bit, you’ll quickly realize that, even though a fairly new buzzword, is not a new concept …. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail etc are all RIAs that came out several years ago. After some more thought, you’ll realize that in today’s context majority of applications that we build have something to do with data that lives elsewhere on the network, therefore the dominant factor that defines an RIA is the richness of the experience users have while using it. So if we oversimplify, RIAs are applications built with special attention to user interface and user experience.

Many modern interface development technologies have been labeled as Rich Internet Application Technologies .. these include AJAX, various Javascript libraries and frameworks, modern browsers, Gears, Flex, Flash Player, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX etc .. while these technologies facilitate building an RIA it does not automatically imply that everything built with them is an RIA … in fact, it is very easy to build a Not So Rich Internet Application with these so called RIA technologies. At the same time, it is important to note that the use of these technologies is not a prerequisite to building an RIA either.

This is how I understand Rich Internet Applications .. what is your interpretation of the term RIA?

JavaFx preview released, here’s my HelloWorld app and some initial thoughts

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:47:58 +0000

Sun Microsystems today announced a preview release of the JavaFX SDK.

I’ve been observing this new entrant into the RIA space from the outside but today I thought it was time to dig in a little bit. So I got my hands on the latest Netbeans wit JavaFx support and cooked up this little Hello World application….

Initial thoughts

Here are my initial thoughts of the technology .. I will try and share more detailed opinion, once I know the technology a little better ..

I don’t particularly like the YAML like declarative syntax for describing UI .. I think XML as used by Flex and Silverlight is more readable .. but I guess this is more of a personal preference
The Netbeans IDE for JavaFx is fairly basic and somewhat buggy right now, I hope this will improve over time
Did they really achieve their goal of making Java UI development simpler than Swing? .. I’m not so sure … I guess I’m still getting used to the JavaFx style of UI development
JavaFx needs a good way to share source, Flex’s really easy way of sharing code has helped adoption, since it makes is very easy for the people in the community to share and learn from each other

Launch Application using Java Web Start
(Note, Java 1.6 is required)

Source:

/* * Main.fx * * Created on Aug 1, 2008, 6:00:51 AM */


package helloworld;
import javafx.application.Frame;

import javafx.application.Stage;

import javafx.scene.CustomNode;

import javafx.scene.Group;

import javafx.scene.Node;

import javafx.scene.text.Text;

import javafx.scene.Font;

import javafx.scene.FontStyle;

import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
/**

 * @author Mrinal Wadhwa

 */

public class HelloNode extends CustomNode {
    public function create(): Node {

        return Group {

            content: [

                Text {

                    font: Font {

                        name: "Verdana"

                        size: 30

                        style: FontStyle.PLAIN

                    }

                    x: 60, y: 110

                    fill: Color.WHITE

                    stroke: Color.WHITE

                    content: "Hello World from JavaFx"

                }]

        };

    }

}
Frame {

    title: "Hello World !"

    width: 500

    height: 250

    closeAction: function() {

        java.lang.System.exit( 0 );

    }

    visible: true
    stage: Stage {

        fill: Color.DARKGRAY

        content: HelloNode{}

    }

}

I will share more detailed code whenever I get some more time to play with JavaFx. Meanwhile here are a few resources that will help you learn ..

I look forward to the final release of Java SE Update 10 and the final release of JavaFx SDK .. these are exciting times in RIA land.

Latest Example ReadWriteWeb: A-list bloggers are so confused about RIA technologies

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:46:28 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about how several A-list bloggers are confused about various Rich Internet Application technologies and don’t exactly know what each one is. I also shared an example of how Mary Jo Foley’s recent post was wrong in so many ways and how I had noticed a similarly confused post on TechCrunch a while back.

Swaroop just twittered me the latest example from ReadWriteWeb … Bernard Lunn has post on ReadWriteWeb today titled MetaASO: A Bootstrapped P2P Startup From India and in the middle of the post he says and I quote:

MetaASO stumbled at the first hurdle for me, which was that you need Silverlight and that means a PC (I use a Mac). So I would be interested in any first hand experience with their product. PC is still the best shot for volume, so I don’t doubt the strategic wisdom of going that route.

But wait .. Silverlight does run on a Mac … now if you follow the link that Bernard has linked to with the phrase “you need Silverlight” it very clearly states that the software runs on Windows XP and Vista using the .Net runtime which Bernard miss-translated to “you need Silverlight”.

Microsoft Silverlight player is a cross operating system, cross browser plugin which is very similar to Adobe’s Flash Player. Its has a subset of abilities of the .NET Runtime. The term Silverlight also includes the web application library built on top of the runtime and this library is very similar to Adobe’s Flex Framework

Microsoft’s .NET runtime is a Windows only desktop runtime. Some version of it is included in most recent version of Windows. It allows you to run Windows desktop applications.

These examples bother me because some of the latest applications on the web are being built with Rich Internet technologies so why don’t these voices of the web spend some time understanding the buzzwords before using them.

A-list bloggers are so confused about Rich Internet Application technologies

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:46:55 +0000

Mary Jo Foley, who blogs about Microsoft on her very popular ZDnet blog has an article titled “Microsoft Live Mesh to get more competition from Sun” where she says …

Robert Brewin, Sun Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, described Hydrazine to me as a combination of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Google Analytics all rolled into one. It’s a platform that Sun is building on top of JavaFX ….

Wo !! something seems wrong already … Hydrazine seems like a server side solution and JavaFX is all about the client side, how can Hydrazine be built “on top” of JavaFX .. anyway I continue reading and she completes the above sentence as follows ..

.. JavaFX, which is Sun’s rough equivalent to Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Umm, not exactly …

Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR are in no way equivalent
Microsoft Silverlight is equivalent to Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Flex framework taken together
Sun’s JavaFX is equivalent to Adobe Flash Player + Adobe Flex Framework + Adobe AIR + some more yet to be done stuff in the mobile space

Then she goes on to say ..

Sun also is working on JavaFX Script, a new scripting language that will do for Java developers what FlexBuilder and Expression Blend are for Adobe and Microsoft developers, respectively.

Oh K .. this statement is all kinds of wrong …

JavaFX Script is a programming language like Adobe’s ActionScript+MXML … or Microsoft’s XAML+any CLR language
Adobe’s FlexBuilder is an Integrated Development Environment like Microsoft’s Visual Studio or Sun’s NetBeans
Microsoft’s Expression Blend is an RIA design tool which has no equivalent yet .. Adobe is building Thermo which will fill this gap on their RIA stack .. and apparently Sun is doing something in this space too.

Mary is not the only one among the A-listers who is confused about all these technologies, not too long ago I remember seeing an article on TechCrunch which was equally confused … I have come across several such confused articles in the past few months.

Its hard to blame these guys either because there are so many companies getting involved in the RIA space today (Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Mozilla among others ) and there are several new technologies and platforms in development that people are bound to get confused .. but I get concerned because both the above articles were on Techmeme so they were obviously read by thousands of people.

I love reading these blogs and I hope that the writers would do some more research before talking about such new and upcoming technologies otherwise they only add to the already existing confusion.

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article that shows similar confusion, read more here

Finally ! a cool JavaFx example

Mrinal Wadhwa — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:36:19 +0000

Sun Microsystems announced JavaFX (their RIA platform) a year ago but till now all we had seen were some lame examples mostly because (I guess) the deployment platform for JavaFX wasn’t ready yet.

Sun’s yearly developer conference JavaOne is currently going on and it looks as though some cool stuff is being shown there. I saw a twitter from Dion Almaer (of Ajaxian fame) where he shared a video of a really cool demo .. even though the demo crashed a couple of times … it does tell you a lot about the platform…

Things I liked …

Convert a web app to a desktop app, just by dragging it to the desktop (super cool !!)
Same code running on browser, desktop and mobile (if you believe the demo )
Hardware accelerated 3D

One big question I have to ask … is the web part an applet? does Sun really think people are going to get comfortable with applets again (even if the file size is now a lot smaller)?

Anyway its great to see how things are shaping up in the RIA world, if you want to learn more about JavaFX head to http://javafx.com or http://openjfx.dev.java.net/. here’s an image that presents a broad picture …

Do let me know what you think of JavaFX and how the RIA space is shaping up.