The competition

[Daniel Zwolenski]

Hi Richard,

There was a thread a couple of weeks ago on jfx performance to which myself and a couple of others responded but no one from Oracle did. The conclusion from that thread from people building rich jfx apps was that jfx was not providing smooth performance. Unless I missed it there's been nothing to negate that - the onus of making sure the perception is otherwise rests with oracle really. 

Perhaps jfx has a higher frame rate, I don't know. That's quite a narrow benchmark though and from my experience using jfx, and also building very similar applications in jscript (ie dynamically updating trees, tables, forms with page animations) the jfx app was noticeably laggy and/or jittery on reasonably high end win7 desktops and laptops. Those same computers running the latest version of Google Chrome achieve better visual outcomes for similarly complex/rich jscript screens. Whether this is what you mean by "simple" screens I couldn't say but I would say they are the standard, modern, popular, rich web application screens and my review was preceded with the statement that web was the context I was reviewing it in.

As a side note, I also can't see any technical reason why Chrome for example would have any limitations on it that java doesn't have. They are both virtual machines that adapt a higher level language to the native OS. As I said in my email, performance is an area where historically browsers have been bad (opportunity for jfx) but it's also an area that browser vendors are heavily focused on and rapidly improving (risk for jfx). If jfx has a lead in this space, it will need to work hard to maintain it, and fast to capatilize on it. 

The raspberry pi would feature very low in terms of market share in the space I am talking about. 

Also it was all just my personal analysis of the space, provided as a side note to your main work since oracle has stated its not a space it is focusing on. Performance was just one small part of my breakdown of the space. The viability of jfx as a competitor to jscript in the web/consumer space (the purpose of my email) is based on a tapestry of factors. I meant only to highlight my view from the street and also I am using this analysis to determine what areas of jfx I am focusing on so it is helpful for me to put it in words. 

Basically I took on board your response to my Enterprise JFX working group proposal and I'm just doing what I said I thought needed doing instead of pushing oracle to do it. So that includes a maven plugin, analysis of the enterprise/consumer space and next I plan to release example code and a maven archetype for client-server jfx with security and db. These were the things I listed in my proposal. I'm not expecting oracle to care too much about this given its not a target space and my analysis was sent out more for the sub-group in this community who are in the same space of me (they are there and tend to email me directly instead of replying to the group for some reason). 

I'm always open to rebuttal and generally pretty good at taking on board corrections and better ideas if they are tangible. The performance one is hard to quantify currently because while there are many jscript apps out there to look at, there are very few (any?) publicly available, commercial quality jfx apps out there to compare to. If you can provide some example of real world apps where the jfx experience is better than can be achieved with jscript in the latest chrome or Firefox then I will very happily change my opinion.

Cheers,
Dan 



On 01/12/2012, at 8:31 AM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 30, 2012, at 1:22 PM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
>>> in practice jfx is no faster than modern browsers
>> 
>> In every test I've seen, we are are much as 10x faster than browsers (for example, on PI). Do you have any data to suggest the browser actually is comparable? Or are you just saying that for simple pages that don't need to scale, the performance of a browser fits within 60fps and thus you don't see a difference?
> 
> Make sure this is stated accurately -- in some tests on some platforms I've seen more than 10x performance difference -- in other cases it is less, but in no case have I seen any test where we are slower than a browser -- any browser.
> 
> Richard