Now that JavaOne 2007 has come and gone, we’ve time to reflect and digest the wealth of information condensed into one week. The main announcement that grabbed everyone’s attention was JavaFX, the new addition to the Java platform to ease and simplify development of compelling user interfaces for users (meaning not ‘developers’).
During the week there were numerous comparisons to Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight, a browser plugin to enable creation and delivery of .NET based rich internet applications, however this blog post puts JavaFX into perspective. Without the equivalent of Macromedia’s Flash Professional currently there is no time based UI and animation creation tool for JavaFX. Editing and syntax highlighting support was mentioned as an add-on for Netbeans, this is no competitor to Flash Professional’s content creation support. Also, without further details it is assumed that to run JavaFX you will need a Java Runtime Environment on your machine – this is a significant download compared to the lightweight Flash Player plugin for most browsers.
JavaFX holds a lot of promise, but there is definitely room for the concept to grow if it is to complete in the same area as Flash.