When I saw JavaFax at last's and this year's at JavaOne, I did walked out of the presentations a bit skeptical "... yeah right, how is Sun's going to compete with the deadly Adobe Flex/Flash combination ... it's marketing gimmic" . Well today (and if you been following JavaFx, for a while) Sun finally made good on its promise of delivering a Rich Media platform by officially releasing the SDK for JavaFx (at http://javafx.com, the site is being slammed, everything is slow now).
I must say that I am less skeptical now and cautiously optimistic on the future of Java as a rich media platform. This could actually work.
Java as viable rich mediumUsing
JDK 6 update 10 (released earlier) as a base, you now can see how applets are positioning themselves to be a formidable option to the Flex/Flash combo.
1. Applets load gracefully
2. Online streaming videos with AppletsHere is something you have never done/seen before with Java applets. Online videos, cool!
3. Rich Applet Look at the skinning, the rich interaction options provided by this applet, yes this not flash, it's a Java applet
JavaFx.Com The site has been redesigned and contains tons of examples and code for you to get started. I have already dowloaded the SDK today and will start playing around with the technology. You may encounter heavy traffic.
I hope that this is just a start and Sun and the Java community continues to support this effort that I think all Java developer will benefit from.
About Vladimir Vivien
Vladimir Vivien is a software engineer living in the United States. Past and current experiences include development in Java and C#.Net for industries including publishing, financial, and healthcare. He has a wide range of technology interests including Java, OSGi, Groovy/Grails, JavaFX, SunSPOT, BugLabs, module/component-based development, and anything else that runs on the JVM.
Vladimir is the author of "JavaFX Application Development Cookbook" published by Packt Publishing. He is the creator of the Groovv JmxBuilder open source project, a JMX DSL, that is now part of the Groovy language. Other open source endeavor includes JmxLogger and GenShell. You can follow Vladimir through his blog: http://blog.vladimirvivien.com/, Twitter: http://twitter.com/vladimirvivien, and Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vvivien.
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