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JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
URL: java.net poll
At 7:32 PM on Aug 22, 2007, Michael Urban wrote:
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But JavaFX doesn't stop at running just inside the browser. It can also be used to write desktop applications, and even Java ME applications in the future. The JavaFX API is quite powerful, but at the same time, significantly less complicated than the Swing API. JavaFX is more cross platform than Silverlight, and more powerful than, as well as much more cross-platform than Apollo. but how much interest is there really?
Of course, standard disclaimers about "This is not a scientific poll, etc.. ,etc..." apply, but a recent poll on java.net sheds some light on the subject. According to the poll, 15.6% of respondents said they were "very interested" in JavaFX. Unfortunately,, however, 27.6% said they were only ?somewhat interested?, 25.7% said they were "not very interested", and 20.4% said they were "not at all interested". If you are doing the math, you found there is 10.4% left. Those 10.4% had never even heard of JavaFX, by responding with "JavaFWhat"? And since that poll likely only indicates the interest that Java developers themselves have in JavaFX, it doesn't even account for the rest of the developer population, which has probably never even heard of JavaFX.
Despite the fact that JavaFX is receiving quite a bit of press in Java land, with how-to articles and such appearing on the Java desktop community site, actual developer interest, according to the poll (again, with standard disclaimers applied), seems fairly low. This raises a few interesting questions in my mind:
I look forward to hearing what others in the Java community think on these questions. I, for one, think that JavaFX has a lot of potential--far more potential than the competing technologies. JavaFX can be used in the browser, on the desktop, and even for programming the next generation of Java ME phone applications. Why does the interest level, at least according to this poll, seem quite low?
Looking forward to your comments.
64 replies so far (
Post your own)
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
I'll have a reply in the editor's blog tomorrow, but I think you're profoundly misreading the data. Combine "very" and "somewhat" interested and you've got 43.2% expressing some level of positive interest. Also consider the fact that JavaFX Script is a client-side/user-facing technology, and when server-side Java guys typically outnumber client-side by seemingly 10-to-1 or more, I think it's pretty obvious that JavaFX has caught the eye of some number of people who aren't currently working on GUI's.--Chris Adamson
Editor, java.net
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
It's hard for me to be interested, because FX doesn't (directly) solve any issue I'm interested in. Specifically, I'm not interested in creating "Flash Sites" in Java.When folks talk "rich client" to me I think of VB, not Flash. Forms with buttons talking to drop downs entering data and creating bar graphs.
Lickable buttons, dancing hamsters, jazzy soundtracks, etc are completely uninteresting to me. List Views, Tree Controls, Task Panes, "Swing Stuff" interest me.
The Jave Kernel, or User Runtime, or whatever is more interesting if it improves overall start up time. But FX doesn't directly deal with that either.
Finally, FX "isn't" Java. Or, it's as much Java as Javascript or Ruby or Groovy is Java. It's a scriptable graphic/animation centric run time that happens to run on the JVM. But, it's not Java.
But that's me.
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
I tried writing a JavaFX app. The documentation is spotty, with undocumented APIs used in example code. The netbeans plugin was really buggy too. For some reason when you did a clean you'd lose changes, which I didn't understand. I eventually gave up. I'll prolly take a look at in again in the future, but for such a big announcement/hype you'd think there would be something at least beta.Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
Well, I think Java has lost the "slow and clumsy" opionion for applications, but just yesterday I proposed to use a Java Applet instead of Flash, I got everybody scared. They looked at me like I was a fool.For JavaFX to become popular I think it needs to target a specific aspect, it needs to provide something other tools can't. And I don't know what that would be...
Still love Java.
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
Well, I guess it kind of depends on what one considered to be meant by "somewhat interested". To me, that means basically the same thing as a passing interest, which is less interest than I would like to see.Yes, it's true that server side Java outnumbers client side. But I'm also factoring in the fact that it would be nice to see the Java ME guys interested in it as well. I'm sure that some of the Java people who aren't currently working on GUIs are interested in it. But what about people who currently aren't using Java at all? Any thoughts on them?
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
I'm a 'server side guy.' I'd like to get back into client work, but would be too afraid of JavaFX not living up to its promises. It may be that JavaFX will get stuck in a catch-22, never gaining enough momentum to live up to its promises. For example, I've used different runtimes in the past, and always found they couldn't quite do what I needed them to do. Multimedia support is one key area, and Sun seems to have rolled back support recently (perhaps handing off to third party open source implementations like jlayer). And will they really deliver with support for JavaME? That would be ground breaking, having different runtimes for different devices is quite a problem.Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
Well, I think asking how much interest there is is asking the wrong question. JavaFX has yet to prove its usefulness; but there is a lot of promise there. People are interested in something inasmuch as it solves a problem they have; or solves a problem they didn't know they had until they saw it could be solved.I mean, I first got on the internet (other than using telnet from a university mainframe in 1989 or so) in 1994. How many people who use the internet daily now and who were alive and potential internet users in 1994 would have said "yes, yes, I need that!" if you described the internet to them and asked them if they wanted that?
This *is* a tortured analogy - I'm not saying that JavaFX compares to the internet in the slightest, in terms of technologies that have vast impact on human interaction and behavior. My point is that interest in a technology is a self-fulfilling phenomenon - it doesn't take a million developers interested in JavaFX to make it viable, it takes one developer who creates an application of the technology that is compelling enough to capture the imagination of others; and the technology has to be good enough to live up to the promise of the inspiration that application triggers (or if it's not good enough, its development process needs to be open enough that there is a clear path from here to there).
If a poll were taken in the 1920's how many people wanted the dial telephone, would we still be picking up the phone and talking to the operator? I think this is one of those cases where it's about vision, and the open question is if that vision is rich enough to solve a lot of people's problems.
-Tim
NetBeans.org
Evangelist/Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
> Well, I think Java has lost the "slow and clumsy" opionion for applicationsYou know, every now and then I feel this essay/blog coming on, with a title like "Technology is Forever". How long does Java on the client, applets, even, have to prove itself? Well, the answer is...forever. It's not going away; given an infinite (well, barring supernovas) amount of time, sometimes it seems to me like we're too much in a hurry to come up with foregone conclusions about technologies. But especially for things that are open source, techologies accrete - they come and stay, not come and go. Look at Javascript; would anyone have predicted in 2001 that that [miserable, foul, insecure, intermittently-typed] language would be undergoing a renaissance in six years?
So writing applets today is like wearing hawaiian shirts and bermuda shorts - a fashion mistake. It's like buying stocks. Past performance has absolutely nothing to do with future performance. In the stock market that statement is typically used to warn that something that did well can do badly. It equally means that something that has done badly in the past can do extraordinarily well.
The more I read about javascript security exploits, the more I think, gee, we've got this language here with security baked in from the ground up, it already runs in browsers, you don't have to rewrite your code for every browser out there and try to abstract it into a library to make it less horrible...this has got to have some appeal...
If the consumer JRE work going into JDK 7 pays off, there is no reason to think applets won't be more than worth betting on a ways down the road.
-Tim
NetBeans.org
Evangelist/Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
A dancing hamster on every desktop...
> Lickable buttons, dancing hamsters, jazzy soundtracks, etc are completely uninteresting to me.Such a luddite. What about dancing buttons and lickable hamsters?
NetBeans.org
Evangelist/Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
Ah one of the great tech divides! Designers and coders. Sun will have fun straddling this chasm. Everyone whizzed their lines in the sand years ago and nothing has changed.Sun has always been incredibly forward thinking in all their business approaches over the years and this might sound weird but I think they'll need to dumb down their JavaFX offering for the masses. (Not technically, but business-wise) Yep, stoop to M$'s level. Make a ton of examples, give away loads of code, maybe even make a goofy commercial. Hey Mac and PC still crack me up on TV.
Cheers,
Dave
Not much more than vaporware, no?
Since it was launched, I spent a couple of hours reading and searching on JavaFX and the impression I got was that it ain't much more than a bit of hype, some incipient tools and a some guys working on that. That seems to me like a very dubious project... But I may have gotten the wrong impression.I'd really like to be wrong. The current JSF/Ajax trend seems a terrible waste of precious developer time to me and for some time now I'm eager for the RIA wave to come and flush all this to oblivion!
Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
Just my two cents, but, if Sun was serious about making JFX mainstream RIA platform, they should have released 1) almost perfect designer tool for non-coders, 2) truly lightweight compact runtime and 3) tons of tutorials, samples and documents. They have already failed to provide them at startup, this is a bad sign.Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
Probably, if you make a survey on the specialities of the Java developers it would give you that the proportion of people interested in Java FX looks like the proportion of people who dedicates itself to develop rich clients or applications for cell phones (JME). It is logical that a back-end engineer is not going to be interested in Java FX.Re: JavaFX: How Much Interest Is there?
I was very interested in JavaFX (and F3) but at one point I decided I must give it at least one year.We were waiting for F3 to by published for more then half a year. It is somehow unusual for open-source technology to be kept in secret, but we assumed the moment it will be published it will be in beta or RC state and well documented.
It turn to not be a true. (I was not looking at JavaFX for a month or two now, so maybe some of this things changed, but here are the things which affected our decision initially):
- JavaFX is in alpha state and some of the API and language syntax is not jet decided;
- there is no license for JavaFX, so you cannot expect any company to consider it even for a testing;
- the documentation is not complete, it specially lack explanation in areas where JavaFX is radically different from Java like multi-inheritance;
- even the team says the syntax is not fixed there is not clear way to vote for changes specially in areas where the developers have some strong opinions;
There was also big shift in the way Sun described F3 and JavaFX.
F3 was described as the better way to build Java GUI with swing. It promised to be simpler then swing and add possibility to mix swing with SVG-like elements, and basic GUI animations. This was very interested for our team, and probably will be interested for most Java reach clients developers.
JavaFX is described as alternative for Flash, Apppolo, Silverlight etc. For this I believe is not mature enough. Also this technology are not really of interest for server side, or desktop Java developers, so it is natural it did not caught enough attention.
By the way at some point on JavaFX forum it was also expressed by Chris Oliver or some other Sun team member what JavaFX is not targeted for existing Java developers but more for Flash/AJAXS web GUI developers.
I believe Sun miss big opportunity with JavaFX. It was possible to build big open-source community for next generation Java GUI. When this will be done (discussed, tested and used in commercial Java application) it was possible to build truly open-source alternative for Apppolo, Silverlight etc.
Sun decided to go straight for web and JavaME market. They also decided to do everything themselves (the license issue). So I think the only rational decision for Java developers is to wait year or two and not waste any energy in it till it is released.