Rich Internet Applications

Under normal circumstances you might be tempted to suggest that the boss takes that vacation he’s been postponing. But the point of this particular exercise is actually to test-drive Sun’s new JavaFX Script technology – a technology announced with much hyperbole by Sun at JavaOne 2007, which promises to revive Java’s position as a viable client platform, since the Java Applet got pushed onto the sidelines by the likes of Flash.

Here’s a screenshot of what a small team of Canoo developers came up with in approximately eight working days:

Windows users can download a fully functional version of music pinboard application here.

The result is perhaps all the more impressive if we bear in mind that although highly experienced with technologies such as Java and Swing, Canoo’s developers had had no practical experience with JavaFX Script prior to this exercise, so the time spent included learning and the inevitable design “mistakes” followed by refactoring.
We should stress at this point that the purpose of music pinboard is definitively not to compete with the likes of musictonic and iTunes – the two applications, which inspired music pinboard’s design and scope. This was pure technology exploration.

So what did we conclude from our experience with music pinboard?

The short conclusion is: Yes, it definitely is possible to create high-impact applications in a short time-frame with JavaFX Script, especially when given an opportunity to exploit existing code, as well as some of the great web-services that are out there in cyberspace. For a more detailed account of our experience, we will be posting a series of blog entries over the coming days, which essentially document our answers to the following questions:

• Are we noticeably more productive when using JavaFX Script as opposed to, say, Swing, ULC or SWT/JFace?
• Is the resulting code an improvement of equivalent code written in one of these frameworks in terms of readability, maintainability?
• Is it easy to incorporate/reuse existing code written in JavaFX Script?
• How easy is it to access and use Java resources?
• What do we gain above and beyond what existing GUI frameworks offer?
• Does the resulting application compete with native applications in terms of responsiveness?
• Is it possible to create visually striking results? If yes, how much work is required?
• What is the currently state of tool support?
• What is our gut-feeling about this new technology?

In short:

• Bearing in mind that JavaFX is currently only an alpha version, does it live up to the hype?

So stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 10:00 am by Mike and is filed under JavaFX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.