Java vs Java

More specifically the Java language versus the Java platform. I have been playing around with some non-Ajax technologies for rich web clients. I think creating Ajax sites by hand is nuts. Thankfully, we have GWT, RAP and Visual Studio 2008 seems to have Ajax support directly in its palette. At the same time, it's clear that some very powerful forces are converging on Ajax. Namely Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX.

These 3 technologies do something that Ajax can't really do, or at least not very well. They bridge the gap between developers and designers. For example, if you are working in Visual Studio on your client application using Silverlight, the designer can open your Visual Studio project and edit the XAML form from Expression Blend. That's right, the Microsoft designer tools use Visual Studio projects as their project files.

I don't want to spend too much time on this, but you can script Silverlight in any language that the DLR supports. You can code Silverlight in any language that the CLR supports. You can code in Silverlight using C#, IronPython or JavaScript for example. Silverlight is really just a .Net runtime that runs as a browser plugin that depends on WPF to do all its shiny effects. These explanations are bit crude but I want to get to JavaFX sometime this year.

JavaFX is the Flash, Silverlight competitor from Sun. JavaFX is also a completely new scripting language i.e., it's not XML based and I have to ask why? Did Sun forget again that Java is a platform and not just a language? Why can't JavaFX be just like XAML? Forget the new language and just allow us to code in any language supported by the Java platform. I've seen some JavaFX scripting code and I don't care for it. I do not want this. I just want the presentation part. I want the code behind the presentation to be Groovy or any language of my choice that runs on the JVM.

I've talked before about how Matisse, the NetBeans GUI builder, only outputs Java code. The NetBeans JSP page editor, I'm not sure if that is also Matisse or not, suffers from the same problem. Any tooling made available for JavaFX will most likely have the same flaw.

At this point, I just wish I could say I don't care about JavaFX, I really wish I could. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for JavaFX, Sun has committed to bring JavaFX to Java ME, even the puny CLDC profile. With over a billion phones out there running the CLDC profile, it's sort of hard to ignore this. Java ME is a hard place to develop, you have the CLDC, CLDC/MIDP and CDC profiles. All profiles have different versions with tons of packages being optional and not to mention vendor specific packages. Anything JavaFX can do to help in that space would be appreciated.

In the meantime, JavaFX is far from version 1 and while Sun toils away at its new scripting language, you have to ask where are the designer tools? The tools that will actually compete with Microsoft Expression and Adobe Flex.