Jazoon 2009: JavaFX vs. Android
Session title: JavaFX/Android: Competing technologies or ideal partnership?
Speakers: Andreas Hölzl (Canoo), Mike Mannion (Canoo)
Two geeks discussed Mobile/RIA stuff over coffee and while Mike played the part the JavaFX-guy, Andreas was the Android-man in this short talk.
Mike first talks about the JavaFX Mobile architecture, which builds on JavaME. The JavaFX API available to tje JavaFX Mobile developer is a subset of the whole JavaFX API available on the desktop.
Andreas goes on to present the more sophisticated Android architecture, which first of all has an applicaton framework while we see a big hole at this level on the JavaFX side (see slide).
Mike agrees that the application framework is missing on JavaFX. He mentions that both he and Andreas have done iPhone development in which the the importance of the iPhone’s app framework plays a significant role in achieving look and feel consistency across applications.
On the other hand, Mike notes, JavaFX has a very impressive designer-developer workflow, which enables you to transfer static Photoshop or Illustrator design to the netbeans environment. JavaFX can subsequently be used to add functionality to the design. Andreas points out Android’s architecture also permits one person to work on the UI design (working with an XML document) whilst another person works on the functionality (Java code).
The two would-be actors raise the question of how one might possibly get a JavaFX program running onthe Android platform. Two technical scenarios are described, one involving a cross-compiler (cross-compiling JavaFX Script to the Android-compatible Java code), the second involving a port of the JavaFX runtime. The moral of this story is that no matter how you look at it, getting JavaFX to run on Android would be technically challenging. Android was designed from the ground up with its own intentions and philosophy. It would be miraculous if JavaFX would simply work on top of this.
A poll of the audience at the end of the talk reveals that most of the audience thinks that Android will win over JavaFX mobile (in the market place) because of it’s mature and already commercially established architecture.
