JavaFX at JavaOne 2014

[Jeff Martin]

Is it wrong to ask who makes this decision at Oracle? What person, persons or Star Chamber decides to dedicate resources to say graphing or 3D instead of iOS and Android?

What gets you laughed at and discredited for suggesting JFX to a boss or customer is definitely the lack of a mobile "story". And I mean "story" - if Oracle posted a page that said "JavaFX to be officially supported on iOS and Android by 2016", adoption would double overnight. Anyone starting new development today wants to know they will have mobile options at some point in the foreseeable future.

Somebody give us a name. I just hope it isn't "the tooth fairy", "santa", or "Larry Ellison". :-)

jeff


On Jun 23, 2014, at 9:46 AM, Pedro Duque Vieira <pedro.duquevieira at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 
>> 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.
> 
> They've abandoned it but not because of the reasons you imply but rather
> due to HTML5 limitations of providing a good native experience in regards
> to performance, fluid animations, etc.
> And also there's a reason why all of them started using HTML5 in the first
> place: faster delivery time. You only need a code base and with few small
> adjustments can deliver an app for all mobile platforms. Later you can
> start concentrating on delivering the best experience on each platform.
> 
> 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.
> 
> JavaFX is already undoubtedly one of the best cross platform (desktop cross
> platform)  UI toolkits out there.
> But that isn't enough as desktop is becoming less and less important.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 12:17 PM, 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.
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pedro Duque Vieira