Scott Davis interviewed Dierk König, Canoo Fellow and Grails/Groovy-Evangelist for Thirsty Head at blip.tv. In the interview, Dierk gives an inside-view about new Grails improvements, about his JavaOne talk, JavaFX and the impact of Canoo Webtest. Enjoy this interesting chat about “beauty and code”!

First note that the speakers Ben Galbraith and Don Almaer are co-founders of ajaxian.com, which is clearly an AJAX-shop. They claim that Web technologies and Java went stagnent in the UI space. Ajax and JavaFX have the characteristics of a renaissance. They structure the talk in the form of a “discussion” or a series of arguments, where one supposedly pits the advantages of said technology against the other.

•    Argument #1: Java performs way faster than JavaScript; on the other hand JavaScript is getting faster all the time (V8 team at Google); plus apps like Google wave demonstrate that performance is good enough.
•    Argument #2: Responsiveness improved by worker-threads in a Java GUI. Yet using “web workers” we can overcome the limitation of JavaScript to a single thread. Demo of Pictastic proves the point. Having said that, web workers are still 10 times slower than Java; plus the API is extremely limited. In “web worker”, worker threads don’t share state, which is way safer than the totally flexible Java approach.
•    Argument #3: GC way more advanced in Java. On the other hand, incremental GC in Mozilla is improving all the time. A lousy fact of the JVN is having to determine how much memory the app requires (or how much is available) wherever the app is deployed.
•    Argument #4: Graphical capabilities of Java surpass what web apps can do. But performance of Bubblemark benchmark app shows that Google chrome achieves 100 frames per second. By comparison JavaFX achieves 24 FPS. With vector graphics Chrome is back down to 30 FPS. What the speakers don’t consider is that JavaFX is a very new and to-date under-optimised technology.
•    Argument #5: An Ajax 3D demo “metatunnel” is pretty impressive. Most browsers, apparently, are offering 3D extensions. It’s still at the experimental stage, however. JavaFX, on the other hand, has nothing to show in 3D.
•    Argument #6: Java is weak on fonts. The speakers claim that can’t use native fonts in Java (is this true? I seem to remember supplying Java with some additional fonts some years back.) Control over fonts in the Ajax world is even more limited, however.
•    Argument #7: JavaFX provides “amazing” video support. Counter argument: Flash plugin us ubiquitous and surpasses JavaFX in terms of maturity. Open Web Video offers sophisticated video functions.
•    Argument #8: Binding in JavaFX is compact and elegant. Web toolkits are very clumsy by comparison. The speakers quickly mention Mixins, Animation and Effects. All of this is way easier in JavaFX…
•    Argument #9: Legitimate critisisms are raised about JavaFX syntax. Speakers suggest that JavaScript is actually easier and closer to Java than JavaFX Script. And, of course, JavaFX totally lacks widgets like table/tree. Web toolkits even provide some very cool layout management and tools for constructing GUIs.
•    Argument #10: Tooling superior in the Java world.
•    Argument #11: Deployment. Web wins here, obviously, except for significant browser incompatibilities. Applets, Mac etc. are lousy too, however.

Conclusion: A pretty damning result for JavaFX, which is for the most part justified (at least today.) What the speakers fail to do, however, is talk more fairly about the significant problems faced by AJAX developers on a daily basis.

Yesterday night’s so-called “Partner VIP event” gave us a preview as to what Sun will be emphasising at JavaOne this year. Receiving as much fanfare as ever before: JavaFX, version 1.2 of which is being officially released today (June 2nd) – for Desktop as well as for mobile. 

Secondly, the Java Store and Java Warehouse story was briefly revealed, with more details expected at tomorrow’s opening Keynote. Sun is not proposing to host an app store itself, but to provide the infrastructure to whoever wants to. The Java Warehouse is supposed to act as a central repository for apps, which Java Store hosters can tap into, whilst retaining their own front-end and billing schemes. 

Almost as noticeable as the above was the lack of any mentioning what-so-ever of technologies such as Android, Groovy/Grails. Is it forbidden for Sun employees present anything on these (for many) tactically highly important technologies?

Finally, Canoo’s fame really does appear to be growing. Not only we we appear in the official presentations (see pic) but it’s really impressive how many folks are coming up to us and saying how they’ve heard about this Swiss company.

Canoo is delighted to announce that it will be attending the official launch of Sun Microsystem’s JavaFX Mobile technology at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 16-19 February 2009.

JavaFX Mobile aims to make it easier for developers to provide a Rich Internet Application (RIA) experience on state-of-the-art mobile devices, whilst leveraging the ubiquity and capability of Java. Sun’s choice of the MWC as launch event is indicative of the importance it places on the mobile platform for Java’s future.

Canoo is one of a handful of so-called “Java application showcase project” partners. These partners were specifically chosen by Sun because of their leading roles in the booming Rich Internet Application (RIA) market place.

Canoo senior software engineers Mike Mannion and Alberto Mijares will be talking about Canoo’s experience with JavaFX Mobile technology, and will be on hand to demonstrate a brand new version of Music Pinboard entitled Music Pinboard Mobile. The application will be running on a number of the latest hardware devices at the Sun stand.

Here’s a screenshot of Music Pinboard Mobile:

Canoo is delighted to announce that it will be attending the official launch of Sun Microsystem’s JavaFX technology on December 4th, 2008, in San Francisco, CA.

The event will feature a keynote from Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and demonstrations of this significant new addition to the Java platform.

Canoo is one of a handful of so-called “Java application showcase project” partners. These partners were specifically chosen by Sun because of their leading roles in the booming Rich Internet Application (RIA) market place.

Canoo’s CEO Hans-Dirk Walter and senior software engineer Mike Mannion will be talking about their experiences with the first official version of JavaFX, and will be offering their opinions on the contribution it makes to the RIA space.

On show will be a brand new version of the well-known Music Pinboard application. The application makes use of JavaFX’s built-in multimedia support – something which was lacking entirely when the MP was realised using first publicly available version of JavaFX (first announced at JavaOne 2007).

And needless to say we will be paying close attention to how Sun positions its new baby, as well as to what the other attendees are saying. So stay tuned for some exciting updates over the coming days!

Finally, here’s a taster of how the new app looks like: