Johan's Blog

The future of JavaFX

With the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle, questions arise about the future of JavaFX. Some people believe that Oracle is going to dump JavaFX, while others are convinced that Oracle is going to increase the effort in JavaFX.

I am a software developer, and not a business developer. However, I do understand that somehow, be it direct or indirect, there should be some return on investment related to the technology. In a recent series of blogpost, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz explains the business model of Sun, and how they tried to combine innovation and revenue.

For me as a software developer, there is a clear benefit in using JavaFX. We observed that in most of our web-projects, most effort is not spent in coding, but in integrating HTML, JavaScript, css with JSTL and custom tags, and to make the mix browser-independent. This is one of the reasons that I believe in RIA's in general. One of the main benefits of Flex, GWT and JavaFX is that you need to worry less about browser-specific issues. The underlying framework is supposed to solve these issues, and as a developer, you can focus on the functionality.
The three technologies that I mentioned here both have their advantages, and we use all of them at LodgON. Depending on the project, I prefer one or another technology.
Some of the benefits of JavaFX are:

• the existence of a huge functional library, offered by the Java SE.
• the integration in NetBeans (although improvements are welcome)
• the performance. If you compare the current speed of JavaFX apps with early days applets, you know what I mean.
• the way applications can be embedded in a website, and dragged outside the website
• the integration with tools for designers, e.g. Adobe Illustrator.

If the development of JavaFX continues at the current speed, and if we develop more projects on JavaFX, the total cost for a project will surely be smaller compared with a project build with standard web technologies. As a result, the project cost decreases, and more customers can afford a highly interactive community site like the ones we are currently building.
This shows that at least for LodgON, there is a return on investment in using JavaFX. But then, we are not Oracle.

written on 27/04/2009 20:57

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