What would you like to know about JavaFX

[Dick Wall]

Hi folks

We have the opportunity to ask some questions about JavaFX coming up.
JavaFX is something that we have talked about a fair bit already on
the show, and also not something that is a particularly core
competency to most of us on the Posse :-). As such, we wanted to find
out what you would like to know about JavaFX so that we can pass the
questions along.

You can ask anything, in my experience folks like the difficult
questions because it lets them get the answers out there, so feel free
to ask anything you like. The one restriction is that while we will
ask tough questions, we will not be asking any rude or hostile
questions. Once we start doing that we are on a downward spiral to
"gotcha" reporting and that is somewhere we do not want to be.

So please, let us know what you would like to know about JavaFX. We
will probably hit some questions like "do you really think Java FX can
take on Flash", "what about silverlight" and those sorts of things,
but help us out with what you would like to know as well.

Cheers

Dick

[Joshua Marinacci]

Hi Dick.
If you plan to grill me with these questions at Devoxx I can tell you
my strength of will is iron-clad... unless weakened by tasty Belgium
beer. :)
- Josh

[mikaelgrev]

How about this one(s):

1) Why was it necessary to put all that effort into creating a new
language, why couldn't Java be enhanced or Groovy used?

and the followup:

2) Why does everybody with an opinion (outside Sun) think it was such
a bad idea to do so and what are they not understanding?

and a possible followup:

3) Has "another insulating layer" ever solved anything? ;)

I know a lot of people are asking themselves this...

Cheers,
Mikael Grev

[mbien]

1.) Will the JavaFX designer be built on top of NetBeans RCP?
<wait for an answer>
2.) Why not?

-michael

[John Nilsson]

1. JavaFX script is supposed to include an API that lets you decleratively build Swing apps. How would you go about implementing such an JavaFX Script API for your own libraries?


2. What is the plan to rescue what must becalled a total marketing failure of JavaFX?

BR,
John

[kirk]

Joshua Marinacci wrote:
> Hi Dick.
> If you plan to grill me with these questions at Devoxx I can tell you
> my strength of will is iron-clad... unless weakened by tasty Belgium
> beer. :)
>

I will make sure that happens :-)

- Kirk

[Casper Bang]

What's the purpose of reviving the applet tag which was deprecated by
W3C 9 years ago?
http://jfx.wikia.com/wiki/Applet_Example

Why not start from a clean slate, keep the deployment model simple and
rely on the Object tag like Silverlight and Flash, it's not like a 3+
year old JRE will be able to run JavaFX anyway?

/Casper

[mbien]

On Nov 24, 7:53 pm, Casper Bang <casper.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What's the purpose of reviving the applet tag which was deprecated by
> W3C 9 years ago?http://jfx.wikia.com/wiki/Applet_Example

object tag works too...
It is even AFAIK the only way to communicate with applets via
javascript. I don't see a reason to abandon the applet tag entirely -
its only deprecated.

[sherod]

How about: 'why do you think the java community has so much angst and
loathing built up toward jfx?'

[Viktor Klang]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:47 PM, sherod <steven...@gmail.com> wrote:

How about:  'why do you think the java community has so much angst and
loathing built up toward jfx?'

IMHO it's because the product is not clearly defined and communicated.

Exactly what IS JavaFX?
Is it a bird, a plane or superman?

 

--
Viktor Klang
Senior Systems Analyst

[Weiqi Gao]

Dick Wall wrote:
>
> We have the opportunity to ask some questions about JavaFX coming up.
> JavaFX is something that we have talked about a fair bit already on
> the show, and also not something that is a particularly core
> competency to most of us on the Posse :-). As such, we wanted to find
> out what you would like to know about JavaFX so that we can pass the
> questions along.

What will be the licensing model for JavaFX, especially for the parts
that are not openly developed (everything except the openjfx-compiler
and the Scenario scene graph library)?

--
Weiqi Gao
weiq...@gmail.com
http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/

[Joshua Marinacci]

This one I can answer. The object tag, as implemented in existing
browsers, does not work or provides a less than optimal experience for
the end user. We are providing javascript utility functions to
generate the tags anyway so you won't ever need to care about object
vs applet.

- Josh, on the go

[kibitzer]

I might have some questions after tomorrow's Sun Developer Day in
Melbourne, if it's not too late. In fact, I could report on what Sun
says about JavaFX since there's at least one session dedicated to
that. Might provide some fodder.

[Mark Derricutt]

One question I'd love to ask:  Are there any plans to push/pursue/promote JavaFX -the language- for server side development?  The type interference, closures and declarative nature could be wonderful for server side development.  And also, how does JavaFX's implementation of closures etc. play into future Java 7 closures?

Are we likely to see a radical annoucement from Sun that JavaFX the language, will be Java7? :)

--
"It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code." -- Bill Harlan

[Adam G.]

I would like to know, why does it (or did it - depends when you ask)
take so long to release JavaFX? There have been so many announcements
on the JavaOne this year but it is still not released.

Still not sure if it will be shipped in the beginning of December....

Regards,
Adam

[sherod]

The "This ain't your Dad's Java" podcast title for today was "The one
before the launch" and the marketing team have been tweeting all week
about various prep things.

It's going to be the 2nd of December.

[Patrick Wright]

1) One of the coolest things about the early F3 demos from Chris
Oliver was the F3 interpreter and FXPad. It was a nice way to
experiment with the language and APIs, similar to having a REPL in
other languages. I know that, possibly due to resource constraints,
Sun is working exclusively on a compiler for the language and the
interpreter is not being maintained.
a) is this a "final" decision?
b) are there fundamental technical reasons that prevent a fully-
compatible interpreter to be written (perhaps related to language
changes during the specification process)?

2) Does the desktop team have a development plan for the Scenegraph
project outside of its important support role for JavaFX Script?

3) (Minor issue) Can we have a rock-solid commitment from the FX team
that _all_ FX demos hosted by Sun will be pack 200'd? This is a minor
nit, but I get really annoyed waiting a full minute for a spinning box
to appear on-screen.

4) When the runtime mailing lists were still public, there was
discussion of support for integration with external data formats, like
XML, JSON, and integration with data structures like JDBC's result
set. What are the plans in those areas?

5) The JRE includes a preferences API, but for webstart apps I've yet
to see a solid solution regarding local (client) preferences and data
storage. What will FX have to offer in that area?

6) Will FX applets and webstart apps require signing? Many of the
demos I've seen so far have, and I'm wondering why. Granting "all
permissions" to an application signed by "Joshy" worries me a
little :).

7) How does Sun plan to provide for/enable a market aimed at third-
party FX-enabled (commercial and open source) components? The Swing
market has always seemed fractured to me, in comparison to the fabled
ActiveX/VB component market of the 90's.

All for now. Thanks!
Patrick

[Jess Holle]

1. When is the designer tool for FX coming out?
2. Will Java 6 Update 11 and 12 attempt to "finish the job" on Java desktop quality?
• Java 6 Update 10 was a big step forward, but there's still a lot of big ticket bugs out there in this area.  For instance, at least half of the top 25 bugs at http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/top25_bugs.do are Java desktop or applet bugs.  Some of the bugs listed here have been open all but forever and/or have a huge impact, e.g. 6578753, 4330950, etc.  There are plenty of nasty desktop Java bugs (and HTTP(S) client issues) outside the top 25 as well.

That's it for now.

--
Jess Holle

[carljmosca]

I add my vote for this question and add will JSR-295 and JSR-296 be
available (via the designer)?

[Weiqi Gao]

sherod wrote:
> The "This ain't your Dad's Java" podcast title for today was "The one
> before the launch" and the marketing team have been tweeting all week
> about various prep things.

Do you have a link?

Googling "twitter thisaintyourdadsjava" go me here:

http://twitter.com/maybeimright

> It's going to be the 2nd of December.

Are you sure?

Tacit acknowledgment from joshy on this list notwithstanding, the
official press (you know, magazines with journalists and columnists that
verify news reports with sources inside companies) still is mum about
the date.

The closest date I've seen is from this InfoWorld piece (report from
Adobe MAX):

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/18/JavaFX-RIA-technology-almost-ready_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/18/JavaFX-RIA-technology-almost-ready_1.html

or

http://tinyurl.com/javafx

where Sun VP Java Marketing Eric Klein, who I believe is one of the
hosts of the "Ain't Your Dad" potcast, put the time at "end of year 2008."

[Bill Robertson]

Back on topic...

How big of a download do you anticipate for the javafx runtime? Will
you be taking advantage of pack200 to minimize it, or will that
require the application distributor to know how to do? (and therefore
fail to do making download times suck? (and hurting the reputation of
the product? (no I've never really programmed in lisp)))

Will there be a standard place to download from or will an application
provider need to self host? (I have long forgotten the rules for jar
downloads in the applet scenario).

Swing suffered because it could break if the user ran a different
JVM. Is JavaFX sufficiently independent of JVM library versions, or
does it just have a lot of nasty code under the hood to paper over
differences? i.e. will it break when Java 7 comes out?

Is there a full screen mode? e.g. for kiosks

How true is the representation across platforms? Linux, Windows,
Mac? What about fonts?

[Matt Scully]

I just listened to the latest podcast of "Ain't your dad's..." and
they are now saying that December 2nd isn't necessarily a firm date,
but that it may be a few days later. Nevertheless, it does sound like
it will be that first week in December (of course, "nothing firm"
means it could be later as well).

--matt

On Nov 25, 7:56 am, Weiqi Gao <weiqi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sherod wrote:
> > The "This ain't your Dad's Java" podcast title for today was "The one
> > before the launch" and the marketing team have been tweeting all week
> > about various prep things.
>
> Do you have a link?
>
> Googling "twitter thisaintyourdadsjava" go me here:
>
>    http://twitter.com/maybeimright
>
> > It's going to be the 2nd of December.
>
> Are you sure?
>
> Tacit acknowledgment from joshy on this list notwithstanding, the
> official press (you know, magazines with journalists and columnists that
> verify news reports with sources inside companies) still is mum about
> the date.
>
> The closest date I've seen is from this InfoWorld piece (report from
> Adobe MAX):
>

> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/18/JavaFX-RIA-technology-almos...

>
> or
>
>    http://tinyurl.com/javafx
>
> where Sun VP Java Marketing Eric Klein, who I believe is one of the
> hosts of the "Ain't Your Dad" potcast, put the time at "end of year 2008."
>
> --
> Weiqi Gao

> weiqi...@gmail.comhttp://www.weiqigao.com/blog/

[BoD]

mbien wrote:
> On Nov 24, 7:53 pm, Casper Bang <casper.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What's the purpose of reviving the applet tag which was deprecated by
>> W3C 9 years ago?http://jfx.wikia.com/wiki/Applet_Example
>>
> object tag works too...
>

But more importantly: who cares ? :)
<applet>, or <object>, or <whatever>... Is this really worth debating?

BoD

[Casper Bang]

Well pardon me for wanting a clean, clear and consistent deployment
model in my browser, without necessarily needing JavaScript to
generate custom HTML - Flash doesn't need that after all. I can only
guess you never experienced an applet which only works in some browser/
OS configurations due to convoluted deployment?

/Casper

[Brian Reilly]

A banner or javafx.com currently says, "Save the Date! Java FX 1.0
Launch on Dec 4, 2008".

[Joshua Marinacci]

The javascript deployment library is specifically meant to address
applets that only work in some browsers. Lots of browsers have bugs
in the way they interact with applets. Our deployment library is
designed to work around these bugs. If you restrict your users to IE7/
FF3 + JavaSE 6u10 then you probably don't need this library. But to
support anything outside of this matrix means dealing with the reality
of modern browsers, and having a javascript library take care of this
for you is much more desirable than doing it by hand. This is the same
reason that libraries like jquery and prototype exist.

- J

[Mark Fortner]

I seem to recall a JSP tag that dealt with this situation:

http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/JSP/JSPandApplet.htm

Mark

--
Mark Fortner

blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jroller/ideafactory

[Alexey Zinger]

GWT to the rescue! :) Alexey 2001 Honda CBR600F4i (CCS) 1992 Kawasaki EX500 http://azinger.blogspot.com http://bsheet.sourceforge.net http://wcollage.sourceforge.net --- On Tue, 11/25/08, Casper Bang <caspe...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Joshua Marinacci]

I sure am glad we have a javascript free solution like GWT. No
Javascript there! :)

[Patrick Wright]

On Nov 25, 5:50 pm, Brian Reilly <brian.irei...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A banner or javafx.com currently says, "Save the Date! Java FX 1.0
> Launch on Dec 4, 2008".

You visited _that_ website? Why, good heavens, why?

;)

Patrick

[sherod]

Flash used to need convuluted tags :)

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_4150

> > BoD- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[sherod]

You are right, I was wrong, I can't believe something that I heard off
marketing people turned out to be incorrect!!

That *never* happens in my experience.

*grin*

On Nov 26, 12:56 am, Weiqi Gao <weiqi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sherod wrote:
> > The "This ain't your Dad's Java" podcast title for today was "The one
> > before the launch" and the marketing team have been tweeting all week
> > about various prep things.
>
> Do you have a link?
>
> Googling "twitter thisaintyourdadsjava" go me here:
>
>    http://twitter.com/maybeimright
>
> > It's going to be the 2nd of December.
>
> Are you sure?
>
> Tacit acknowledgment from joshy on this list notwithstanding, the
> official press (you know, magazines with journalists and columnists that
> verify news reports with sources inside companies) still is mum about
> the date.
>
> The closest date I've seen is from this InfoWorld piece (report from
> Adobe MAX):
>

> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/18/JavaFX-RIA-technology-almos...

>
> or
>
>    http://tinyurl.com/javafx
>
> where Sun VP Java Marketing Eric Klein, who I believe is one of the
> hosts of the "Ain't Your Dad" potcast, put the time at "end of year 2008."
>
> --
> Weiqi Gao

> weiqi...@gmail.comhttp://www.weiqigao.com/blog/

[kibitzer]

OK, after yesterdays Sun Developer Days event in Melbourne I'd like to
know:
* what's the practical, actual difference between FX Desktop, FX
Mobile and FX TV?
* the proposition seems to be that FX is THE UI build tool for all
devices: desktop, laptop, mobile, TV, GPRS, whatever. Do they mean in
terms of programming paradigms, or that one UI can be built that suits
all devices (which is clearly questionable)
* they mentioned a number of times taking things from Illustrator and
importing them into FX. Is that a dream or a practical, actual
reality? (i.e., is there a tool for this?)

[Joshua Marinacci]

I'll be brief since we will have much more detailed answers in next
weeks launch on the 4th, but are a few quick answers:

On Nov 26, 2008, at 1:33 PM, kibitzer wrote:

>
> OK, after yesterdays Sun Developer Days event in Melbourne I'd like to
> know:
> * what's the practical, actual difference between FX Desktop, FX
> Mobile and FX TV?

The JavaFX APIs have profiles. The common profile works on all
platforms, and includes basic graphics support, the language runtime,
application model, etc. The desktop profile includes Swing and
advanced effects that require pixelshaders (blur, dropshadow, etc.).
The mobile and TV profiles are not yet public, but they will include
functionality specific to those platforms.

> * the proposition seems to be that FX is THE UI build tool for all
> devices: desktop, laptop, mobile, TV, GPRS, whatever. Do they mean in
> terms of programming paradigms, or that one UI can be built that suits
> all devices (which is clearly questionable)

Both. You can use the same SDK, same language, and same set of APIs
on all platforms. If you want you can make a single app run on all
platforms identically, or you can introduce custom logic for different
platforms.

> * they mentioned a number of times taking things from Illustrator and
> importing them into FX. Is that a dream or a practical, actual
> reality? (i.e., is there a tool for this?)

The JavaFX Production Suite (formerly Project Nile) lets you export
from Illustrator and Photoshop using native plugins. This works quite
well. I've used it in several samples that you'll see next week.

Thanks and be sure to email if you have any other questions. Or email
Dick Wall since he'll be interviewing me soon at Devoxx.

- J

>
> >

[Andres Almiray]

1. What will be the license terms? currently we have a mix of GPL and
proprietary licenses (not really enterprise ready as they seem to
promote it)
2. Where are the promised threading advancements?
3. Will Java be able to call JavaFX without an ugly bridge
(javax.script)?
* ties into Mikael Grev -> why reinvent the wheel yet again when
Groovy is capable of yielding similar results
* caveat: Groovy can't run in mobile devices yet but it does it
wonderfully on desktop/server machines =)
4. Will JavaFX provide a full set of Swing component wrappers (JTable,
JTree et al)?
* what about other swing suites (jide, flamingo, etc) ?
5. Is Chris Olivier still on the team?

[Neil Bartlett]

I'm curious when we will see a JSR for JavaFX. Does Sun intend to
standardise the JavaFX Script language and the related JVM changes
through the JCP so that other Java vendors (e.g. IBM, Oracle, Apache)
can build compliant implementations too?