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. Vladimir enjoys taking part in open source projects. He is a contributor on Groovy project (he is the creator of JmxBuilder) and author of other project such as JmxLogger (http://code.google.com/p/jmx-logger/). Vladimir runs the Tampa Java User Group (Tampa, FL).
He has a wide range of technology interests including Java, OSGi, Groovy/Grails, JavaFX, SunSPOT, BugLabs, and anything else that runs on the JVM. He thinks the future direction of the Java platform is hidden in languages such as Groovy and Scala.
More About Vladimir »
