JavaFX 2009 = Struts 2001?

An interesting post from Peter Pilgrim on JavaLobby on the current state of JavaFX. A lot of it is stuff that's commonplace but still apparently necessary to explain to people -- don't learn JavaFX because it's cool, or not cool, or whatever, learn about it if you think an RIA is the right fit for your project and if JavaFX is the right RIA platform to fit your experience and the project's needs. Still, though, he's optimistic about the technology's chances, saying that the project has the vibe to him that Struts did in its infancy, though with a deeper codebase. (You can also listen to Pilgrim talk about it if you're like me and find British accents hopelessly charming.)

But Charles Ditzel would like to remind you that JavaFX is still in its infancy. In a way, his beef is less with JavaFX as a technology and more in Sun's assertions that it will meet all your computing needs; in fact, he comes up with a lengthy and exhaustive list of apps that couldn't be built with JavaFX, or at least can't yet. It's an interesting rhetorical technique, and perhaps one could argue that JavaFX could achieve the same functionality with a radically different design, but it's an important list nonetheless.

And, apropos of nothing except that we like covering Sun/Java related personnel moves around here: the JRuby team has moved en masse to the Engine Yard application hosting company. These guys were already working on JRuby when Sun hired them to work on JRuby all the time; this move might be a sign that Sun thinks JRuby's up to snuff now and they no longer need to support it directly, or that they JRuby guys are bored, or don't want to work for Oracle, or Oracle doesn't want to pay them, or any number of other things. But it will be interesting to see how many open source Java projects Oracle will continue to subsidize in the future.