Newsletter sign-up
View all newsletters

Enterprise Java Newsletter
Stay up to date on the latest tutorials and Java community news posted on JavaWorld

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

JavaWorld.com > Java Standard Edition >

The long death of fat clients

Why JavaFX is a last gasp

By Andrew Oliver, InfoWorld, 06/28/12

  • Print
  • Feedback
.

With Adobe's divestment of Flex and mobile Flash and Microsoft's move from Silverlight to Metro, Oracle now seems all alone in believing that a fat client framework -- in the form of JavaFX -- is a worthwhile investment.

Fewer and fewer options exist for developing purely fat client desktop applications and fewer still for RAD applications with Web-based delivery (aka, "thick clients"). We are on the verge of a purely HTML/JavaScript client world.

InfoWorld's Paul Krill considers Oracle's latest JavaFX move to be too little, too late. Jeff Friesen (writing for JavaWorld) says that's FUD.

Or we would be, if it weren't for mobile pushing us back to client-side development. If you'd asked me a decade ago whether Objective-C would come back from the grave, I would've waited for the punch line to the joke. Meanwhile, Google decided to follow suit with its own slimmed fork of Java and an XML UI definition language.

Tools like PhoneGap didn't make quite the splash they might have because users came to expect that native look and feel. A new niche was created with tools like Appcelerator Titanium that gave a look and feel without making you code in Objective-C, but they were too slow to develop to keep the faux-nativeness going.

Yet HTML5 is starting to come on strong in the mobile world, at least in terms of video and other functionality. Increasingly, developers trying to target both Android and iPhone are going this direction, a choice made easier by the dinosaurs RIM and Nokia continuing their long march into extinction.

Death to fatties
In fact, the new mobile world is driving us to the standards that were always resisted. Microsoft has started supporting jQuery -- at least in spirit. Even Apple, the reigning king of all things proprietary, has become an HTML5 advocate.

Oracle is the last holdout with its JavaFX framework. While visiting my company's Chicago office, I attended a Chicago Java User Group presentation by Oracle's Roger Brinkley. With compliments to Mr. Brinkley, who had a tough job, there was a bit of "party like it's 1999" feel to the presentation.

The JavaFX demos don't work well on the Mac, let alone on Linux. They smelled of SwingSet demos from back in the day. Every developer in the room was probably thinking, "Why would I want to do that fade effect with a big fat Java install when I can do that in jQuery without one?"

The XML language looked like Android's XML UI langauge. When I asked Mr. Brinkley any question that required a comparison between Android and JavaFX, the response was essentially, "This is the direction of Java on the client." Talking points are the last bastion of an intellectually dead argument.

Soothsaying
Oracle seems to be developing JavaFX as a way to hold onto legacy clients that have been leaking to .Net. The strategy will fail because it requires the adoption of "something else." While you're at it, you might as well adopt the something else everyone else is adopting that doesn't require a client-side install, especially since all the stuff JavaFX can do HTML/JavaScript/jQuery can do better.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

  • Print
  • Feedback

Resources