FX Script.
So I’ve been spending some time thinking about Java FX and FX Script that Sun just announced. There’s little enough info about it but what I’ve read doesn’t give me a lot of hope for this new thing.
To start on the bright side it’s open source, or at least on the way towards it. That’s something genuinely great about it and possibly this could have a bright impact on it’s future success. Which is to say, I don’t see any immediate uptake of FX but it’s possible that if developers get into it slowly, it could evolve into something. I mean, I’m not holding my breath or anything, but free software is good and has shown that some projects can really benefit from it.
Well, that’s it for the good.
Here’s one fundamental problem, Sun keeps saying they did this to reach the creative professional, to move java from just the hands of developers into the loving arms of designers around the world. How do they do this? By creating a new and powerful authoring environment that is really easy and intuitive to use for those designer types, something that takes the Flash authoring tool to the next level? No. By creating Yet. Another. Scripting. Language. And what features does this scripting language offer that will make it accessible to designers?
JavaFX Script uses a declarative syntax for specifying GUI components, so a developer’s code closely matches the actual layout of the GUI
Huh, let me run that by some designers and see if that entices them to learn..
Unlike many other Java scripting languages, JavaFX Script is statically typed and will have most of the same code structuring, reuse, and encapsulation features that make it possible to create and maintain very large programs in Java
Wow, I was just talking to some designers and they were saying that the real problem that they were having with all the other scripting languages they learned was that they were all dynamically typed and that was making things too easy for them, so what they really wanted was to move to a statically typed scripting language which sadly was lacking. Well, rejoice! Sun brings you what you asked for.
JavaFX Script makes it easier to use Swing, one of the best GUI development toolkits of its kind
Are they serious? Swing is pretty widely hated by the development world. The best I’ve seen written about it is that it doesn’t actually suck and is a big improvement over AWT.
So that’s one big problem, really, no designer is going to use this. Second, why the hell did they create another scripting language in the first place? If they were going to simply add a scripting language into the mix, if they were smart they’d have picked something like javascript which at least would have the advantage of being familiar to the world of people currently writing actionscript and AJAX apps. Even Microsoft picked that up and didn’t invent a new silverlight script for silverlight.
Third it isn’t really a product, it’s a bundling of existing products with a new scripting language. Sun was like, “Oh snap, everybody’s migrating off java on the server what can we do, quick?” And thus, this thing was hacked together and bundled up.
Fourth they don’t mention video even once. Video is one of the killer apps of the rich internet applications, even if they every now and again squeak that this isn’t supposed to be that, that it’s supposed to be a cross platform development environment - people will want to watch youtube on their phones, too. Microsoft got that and silverlight shows it. Sun doesn’t.
Fifth did you see the video of the presentation they gave introducing this? It seems like even the presenter is bored and completely unthrilled by FX. The presentation itself is awful and boring. He actually says this:
It’s like people standing around looking at fire and feeling really good.
And there you have it, Sun is the new Prometheus stealing FX from the gods above and bestowing it on us mere mortals.
