In a stunning move at this year's JavaOne conference, Sun announced the upcoming release of JavaFX, its framework for building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).  Stunning, you see, because they announced the same thing at *last year's* JavaOne conference.

I read the headline and thought to myself, "Hmm ... this must be some mistake."  But, no, it was not.  Apparently, 2007 was *not* the year of Java on the desktop, and we are forced to endure Sun's desperation pleas of, "All is well!!!" for one more year.  Now, they enter an increasingly crowded field of RIA frameworks, with Flash firmly entrenched and Silverlight gaining momentum.

Java has never had a strong success story when it comes to building GUI applications, despite the ironic fact that the initial vision of Java was that its strength would be on the client-side due to its "write once, run anywhere" cross-platform JVM.  The thought being you could write one client application and distribute that application across Windows, Mac, Linux, etc...  Well, that vision has never materialized.  Swing applications were cumbersome, buggy, resource intensive, slow (with horrendous start-up times), and let's face it, just down right ugly.  Users wanted native-looking apps, and Swing was like a herd of pink flamingos poised conspicuously in the desktop front yard.

Swing has come a long way since its initial inception, but unfortunately for Sun, they haven't been able to shake users' initial perceptions.  In another ironic fact, perhaps the weaknesses of building rich UIs in Java led to its unbelievable success in the late 1990s/early 2000s as a server-side language and for developing web-based applications.  The browser turned out to be a better cross-platform GUI than Swing, plus it required no installation or deployment concerns.

Now, here we are in 2008, and Java is looking a little long in the tooth, even for building web-based applications.  Steve Jobs famously declared Java as being dead (i.e. your act is about as fresh as a Foghat concert) as his reasoning for not including it in the iPhone.  I wouldn't go that far.  Java is so entrenched (especially in Fortune 500 companies) that I'd venture to say that it's going to outlive me.  Ha!  Take that, Steve Jobs!  But as far as building next-generation UIs, as a developer I am left scratching my head as to why the world needs a Java-based RIA so late in the game when Java has never had success in that space in the first place.

Let's hope in 2009, the JavaOne crowd is not left asking, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" as Sun announces, "JavaFX - this time we *really* mean it!".

Thursday, May 08, 2008 9:36:44 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Conferences | Java | Silverlight