Looking for Advice: Flex or JavaFX
Eric Winter
a fairly good solution although sometimes we think the Swing-like
approach is a poor abstraction and too tedious. I have been wondering
if Flex would be another approach that may further allow us to get
away from browser specific behavior but then I have been looking into
JavaFX as well.
JavaFX is appealing because it isn't part of an commercial stack. How
does it compare with Flex. Is Flex just like JavaFX with a head start
or are they completely different?
Thanks,
E
RogerV
They're rather different. For starters, Adobe Flex 2.0 is a very
mature RIA solution that has been available since January 2007. Flex
1.0 appeared way back in March 2004, but it was in Flex 2.0 that a
tipping point was reached in the progression of Flex RIA. And now Flex
3.0 is due to ship in 1st quarter 2008, which will incorporate many
improvements in basic Flex but also will debut the AIR runtime.
In contrast, Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 is a media streaming solution
that is the rough equivalent of what the Flash player was doing 3
years ago. The 1.1 version will start to delve into forms and
controls, ala Flex - but right now it is in alpha. In terms of
developing software as components - Flex is totaly there already.
Silverlight is miles away from enabling this.
JavaFX is further behind the RIA curve than Silverlight. It is still
at the stage of being more whitepaper-ware than software. It will
start to take on some life when the Consumer JRE becomes available -
is supposed to be in 1st quarter 2008. At that time we'll be able to
begin to size JavaFX up as to how fit it is as a RIA solution.
That being said, scripting with the Flex MXML and ActionScript3 are
very productive and easy to get going on. MXML has a great expressive
power for doing forms in a declarative manner. It is much more concise
than what equivalent imperative ActionScript3 would be. None-the-less,
that is the advantage of MXML and ActionScript3. MXML gets translated
into ActionScript3 so that it is a declarative lanaguage that can be
said to be completely symmetric with respect to ActionScript3 and the
Flex Framework classes. (My developers that have worked with the
JavaFX script language say that it is a more disjoint experience than
MXML/ActionScript3 in this regard.)
The ActionScript3 language is the ECMAScript 4 enhancement of
JavaScript. The nice thing is that classes and interfaces are first
class parts of the language, and the default manner of compilation is
to enforce strong type checking. Hence Java programmers take to
ActionScript3 very quickly indeed as there is very little mental
translation stuff to deal with. The E4X feature is rather nice for
dealing with XML formatted data transfer objects. The properties,
events, and declarative data binding features of Flex set it heads and
shoulders above the other solutions. This is what enables a true
component-based approach.
BTW, I did some personal research stuff with GWT and had some of my
developers do more extensive research prototypes. I very much
appreciate the ingenuity of GWT as a solution attempt at embracing the
native JavaScript/DOMs of the various browsers. However, we all
quickly found it just didn't compare to what we could achieve with
Flex. We've since dropped GWT and settled on Flex.
Joshua Marinacci
to stay out of these conversations because I would be a biased
entrant and probably don't have much to add. However, I do want to
correct one statement.
Java FX is not whitepaper-ware. There are alpha builds you can
download *right now* and play with. It is certainly not ready for
production quality apps, but it's not whitepaper-ware.
Java FX is also *not new*. Yes, the JavaFX Script parts are new and
very alpha, but the core of JavaFX is JavaSE. Just as Flex is a
relatively recent environment built on the mature Flash platform,
JavaFX is a new environment built on the very stable and mature
JavaSE platform. To say that JavaFX is completely new code is simply
not true. The value of client Java will certainly improve once the
Java6 Update N release is out (formerly called the Consumer JRE), but
that doesn't change the fact that millions of people use reliable and
robust client Java applications today; and this will only continue in
the future.
Okay, back to the fray. :)
Josh
Casper Bang
what is there now and what has proven itself productive, JavaFX simply
isn't and hasn't. It's the same thing with Swing App Framework and
Beans Binding, it's certainly going to be an improvement when its
stable and mature (de-facto if you will) but right now I am not so
sure I have saved much from using both, I should probably have chosen
NetBeans RCP instead.
/Casper
robogeek
This isn't entirely accurate. Yes JavaFX Script is a new language but
it's riding on a tried and true platform (JavaSE) with over a decade
of work behind it, and a huge ecosystem of toolsets and libraries.
All of that can be used from a JavaFX application. Okay, so it's hard
to imagine a JavaFX application that'd want to use CORBA but the
ability is there.
Casper Bang
> This isn't entirely accurate. Yes JavaFX Script is a new language but
> it's riding on a tried and true platform (JavaSE) with over a decade
> of work behind it, and a huge ecosystem of toolsets and libraries.
How is that inacurate? Flex has been around (with a pervasive no-
nonsence runtime) since 2004. A simple search on Google reveals a ton
of examples of Flex in production environments:
http://www.scion.com/
http://ezmo.com/
http://h30393.www3.hp.com/printing/app/us/en/launch.aspx
http://www.searchmash.com/flash/search/#home
http://www.ilog.com/products/elixir/
http://viibee.com/
http://www.scrapblog.com/
http://www.splashup.com/
http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp
Java bias aside, doesn't that not imply that they are not at the same
level of maturity?
/Casper
James Ward
http://flex.org/showcase
-James
Michael Neale
http://blog.brokenfunction.com/2007/01/29/how-to-develop-for-flash-on-any-os-for-free/
I don't really know that much about "flex" apps, but have some
experience with flash. In summary, I would say the tooling for
developers is at best ordinary (presumably designers love CS3 - I hate
it) - BUT, and its a big but, the end result is fantastic for end
users. The attention to detail on loading times, bandwidth, and the
easy access to audio/video (microphones etc) is amazing. Adobe seem to
have their priorities right and it shows.
On Nov 13, 6:29 am, "James Ward" <jaw...@adobe.com> wrote:
> I think it depends on what you are comparing. VM, tooling, APIs, programming model, RIA platform as a whole, etc. However for a longer list of public Flex sites, check out:http://flex.org/showcase
>
> -James
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: java...@googlegroups.com <java...@googlegroups.com>
> To: The Java Posse <java...@googlegroups.com>
> Sent: Mon Nov 12 11:24:52 2007
> Subject: [The Java Posse] Re: Looking for Advice: Flex or JavaFX
>
> On Nov 12, 7:05 pm, robogeek <reiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > This isn't entirely accurate. Yes JavaFX Script is a new language but
> > it's riding on a tried and true platform (JavaSE) with over a decade
> > of work behind it, and a huge ecosystem of toolsets and libraries.
>
> How is that inacurate? Flex has been around (with a pervasive no-
> nonsence runtime) since 2004. A simple search on Google reveals a ton
> of examples of Flex in production environments:
>
RogerV
> I found this useful for flash/flex using all free tools:http://blog.brokenfunction.com/2007/01/29/how-to-develop-for-flash-on...
>
> I don't really know that much about "flex" apps, but have some
> experience with flash. In summary, I would say the tooling for
> developers is at best ordinary (presumably designers love CS3 - I hate
> it) - BUT, and its a big but, the end result is fantastic for end
The Flex Builder is a plugin for Eclipse. This provides for a visual
forms design tool that enables convenient switching back and forth
from visual design mode to MXML source code mode.
The Flex 2 version is not bad and developers have no problem being
quite productive with it.
However, in a recent Flex training class we got a lot of exposure to
the Flex Builder in Flex 3 - there a lot of nice enhancements. We also
found out that we can go ahead and use the beta Flex Builder of Flex 3
and yet target the Flex 2.0 SDK. So it pays to switch to Flex Builder
3 right now - the beta is entirely stable enough.
Michael Neale
I do like how flash makes rich media stuff so easy (and possible).
Sandy
Sandy
On Nov 12, 11:24 am, Casper Bang <c...@brunata.dk> wrote:
> On Nov 12, 7:05 pm, robogeek <reiki...@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]