JavaFX at JavaOne 2014

[Felix Bembrick]

Community members such as Gerrit Grunwald have already demonstrated an
application with a single JavaFX code base running on Windows, MacOS,
Linux, Android, iOS and even Raspberry Pi.

BTW, I totally disagree with you on your comments about the similarities of
the desktop UIs and some sort of unique, device-specific UI on mobiles and
tablets.  The truth is, the desktop OS UIs are vastly more sophisticated
than phone or tablet UIs and much harder to make look good in a
cross-platform way.  By contrast, there is usually very little to the
actual "native" look and feel of iOS or Android and skinning a JavaFX app
and supporting touch/gesture interfaces etc. is comparatively much easier.

I think it's fair to say that (random) iOS apps 1 & 2 will typically look
more different from each other than Windows apps 1 & 2.

There is no point in focusing exclusively on a desktop solution as the
majority of *new* app/application development is occurring in mobile and
embedded space.  It's true that there are several classes of application
that will *always* require a desktop OS but we must move forward and ensure
that JavaFX apps achieve a separation score of zero when evaluated against
my "6 Degrees of Separation" defined here:
http://justmy2bits.com/2013/09/30/javafx-on-ios-and-android-six-degrees-of-separation/

To me, JavaFX is the Holy Grail we have been looking for... or at least it
*will* be when the iOS and Android ports are kicking arse.  And I have
*every* confidence in those fine people looking after those ports that they
can do just that.

Felix



On 23 June 2014 21:17, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:

> >
> > If it is correct that JavaFX won't be supporting iOS or Android
> > (officially), IMO JavaFX will start fading away as soon as there is a
> > reliable technology that can create apps for all platforms.
>
>
> People have tried HTML5 as a way to create apps for mobile platforms. Most
> of the big names who tried this e.g. Facebook have abandoned it.
>
> Personally, I don't care much about JavaFX on Android or iOS because mobile
> has such different UI requirements and conventions to desktop platforms. I
> can write a JFX GUI that looks and feels good across Mac/Win/Linux with
> very little platform specific code because those platforms are all quite
> similar and anyway, the respective developers of those platforms trained
> users to expect apps to not fit in perfectly.
>
> On mobile, things are different: you can't just use a desktop UI, you need
> a totally new UI and maybe even feature set built from scratch. On Android
> the UI toolkit is closely linked with the lifecycle rules. And UI's tend to
> be a lot more consistent, with the worst offenders being apps that weren't
> updated to the latest UI conventions yet rather than apps which simply
> reinvent the look and feel from scratch.
>
> I'd actually prefer that Oracle focuses on making a great desktop solution.
> Hype aside there are still many apps not appropriate for mobiles or
> tablets. Then with a Java or JVM-language backend I can have just two UI
> codebases, one for desktop, one for Android and that gets most mobiles.
> Then RoboVM's Cocoa bindings can be used if need be for iOS.
>
> BTW I don't think JavaFX can "fade away" given that it's starting from
> obscurity already ;) Truth is the world lacks a convincing cross platform
> UI toolkit at the moment:  there's Qt, which is fine for C++ but is not so
> pleasant from other languages, there's Swing, there's HTML5. Both Swing and
> Qt have a reputation for making ugly GUI's. That may or may not be deserved
> these days, but people remember the history. Plus deployment is horrible.
> That leaves HTML5, which despite its manifest limitations at least can be
> made to easily look good via CSS, follow modern fashions, work on
> everyone's computers and people don't have to download an extra app
> runtime. So for many apps it's appropriate especially when the bulk of the
> app logic runs on a server.
>
> JavaFX 8, at least based on my experience so far, can be used to make
> attractive and web-style UIs, thus matching the first of HTML5's
> capabilities, plus it has the benefit of actually being designed, unlike
> HTML which just evolved. This leaves deployment as the primary problem. For
> this reason Danno is my current fav member of the JavaFX team :) Nothing
> personal guys, I just see cross-platform deployment of *reasonable sized*
> apps
> to be the biggest competitive weakness right now.
>