No JavaFX for iOS, Android or WP (original) (raw)

Pedro Duque Vieira pedro.duquevieira at gmail.com
Tue Oct 9 15:12:39 PDT 2012

Richard and crew, is Oracle using JavaFX in commercial situations? If so are you able to tell us how/where (ie what space) and to what extent? Maybe knowing this will help us understand the reasons behind all this and the direction Oracle sees this all going (and allow us to decide if we want to help row that boat or jump out now). Just as (possibility more) disappointing as the mobile stuff is this vibe that Oracle does not see JFX having much of a role in the 'web' space. It looks like a straight bow-out to HTML5. I highly doubt any of this stuff is your, or your team's preference and sentiment, but as great as that is, it doesn't help us. Oracle holds the purse strings and that's what will control, and direct the platform. Serious, non-rhetorical question: if you were a front-line developer right now what sort of job would you say to your customer "the best platform your needs here is JavaFX"? The notion that once its all open source the community can do all the extra work to bridge the short commings is a bit of a fantasy. Firstly, it's going to take way too long to get there, established platforms are snowballing ahead as JavaFX struggles to catch up. We'll have HTML6 by the time JFX gets open sourced AND then the community gets round to adding features that needed to be in there 6 months ago to be competitive. Secondly, where's the incentive for the community to do this? Why not invest our time in making something with a more complete base better instead of plugging gaping holes in a niche, orphaned technology that "has interesting potential". There's no critical mass to the community yet, and another year or two of not being relevant in the major spaces of web and mobile will only see this worsen. I've had to go to HTML5 over the last few months because JFX just isn't ready. Another couple of months and I'll be so heavily invested in HTML5 based solutions that I won't be able to justify coming back. Finally, if we didn't need a large corporation backing/financing the main components of this thing then JFX would have been built by the community years ago. If Oracle is only looking at this platform as some sort of glorified 3D charting gimmick, then the community won't get the under-swell of momentum it needs to get past the tipping point where it just grows by itself. The attitude needs to be "if you build it, they will come". Currently it looks like "when they come they can then build it". Can anyone actually see that working? Without web and/or mobile you're fishing for a community without having any bait. No community means no one to build the tools needed to then grow it, no one pushing IDEs to support it, no one making frameworks others can leverage. Which of course is a cyclic spiral into obscurity. As I said I dont doubt your commitment to this platform but I do now doubt Oracle's. I want to be wrong - tell us how and when JavaFX is going to be relevant to any significant space or sector.

+100 on Daniel Zwolenski comments. I wish JavaFX to be the platform of choice for RIA but right now with the current state of affairs I don't see that coming.

-- Pedro Duque Vieira

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