An FXML Browser (topic branched from Re: High performance text component)

[Jeff Martin]

Your work has always been awesome in this area (I was a big fan of Pivot :-). I have no worry of FXML going in a wrong direction, but I have two data points.

When I started at NeXT, we had this wonderful "Display Postscript" that turned out to be problematic. I think PostScript itself was a problem for Adobe, since it was both a page description format and a programming language. People could do very clever things with it, but it was hard to add simple PostScript support to an app (or a new device) without including a runtime that could dwarf the host app. Both Adobe and Apple have since moved to a PDF model, which is a concise version of PostScript, without the language constructs.

Datapoint 2 would be JavaFX 1.0. Very cool language that totally mixed graphics description with application logic. It made it hard to write an JavaFX editor that didn't also know a bit about programming language constructs. Thankfully we now have FXML.

I'm sure a lot of people think HTML with embedded JavaScript is beautiful, so I won't touch that. :-)

Jeff Martin


On Sep 4, 2012, at 10:08 AM, Greg Brown wrote:

>> I'm a big believer in the separation of presentation and logic
> 
> This is probably a bit off-topic for the thread (as well as the list), but I've always been an advocate of separating "presentation and data", which has some well-known and clear benefits. I'm not sure what advantage you might derive from trying to separate presentation from logic (at least, logic that is associated with the presentation), but maybe I misunderstand the intent.
> 
> G