One of the major reason why Silverlight and Adobe Flex will be more successful in the future is because Microsoft and Adobe know how to deliver commercial grade software products with sense of urgency and market orientation because these traits are part of their DNA. These companies sell “real” prodcts and hence understand what it takes to create consumer products that meet developer and business needs and willing to direct “unlimited” resources into their strategic products, that pave the way for business profitability. For example, Silverlight and Flex sdk are free but not their IDE.

However, it appears that Sun is in dilemma, as Sun has been less successful on selling and marketing consumer products because it is more of engineering company rather than business company when it comes to software. I can recall numerous products that attempt to sell to consumer but end up gathering the dust. On the other hand, giving free software and open-source source code as core strategy has backfired because it directly affect business decision to direct resource into their strategic product because it cannot justify the enormous expense into product that is free, and which means that most free product will not meet the expectation of the consumers due to limited resources to meet the deadline eg JavaFX Designer tool, JWebpane, etct. There seems to be blatant lack sense of urgency when it comes to delivering free “strategic” stuff and hopefully Sun and Oracle can address those shortcoming especially if the competitors can address those aggresively. I believe that if Sun listen to real developer’s needs and commit more resources to deliver the expectation, its “free” products will gain more acceptance. As of now, some develope will find it hard to seriously learn and use JavaFX for project because it is still perceived as “half-baked”. The challenge of Sun is to convince and assure developer that JavaFX is ready for real, deliverable project not experimental project.

It is also dismay that when it comes to RIA, Silverlight and Adobe Flex development team look more open and engaging and willing to discuss forthcoming features and issues than the JavaFX equivalent. It look like we only know about the JavaFX products and its features when it release and by then it is too late to address those shortcoming and expectation. Hence I don’t think element of surprise works for development plalform although it works for Apple. Developer want to know what’s in now and future to justify continuous effort in learning a technology, not what’s surprise.

The one area where I see room for a breakout is on cell phones. I hope Sun is able to keep focused enough to deliver a version of JavaFx that can work on Android cell phones. Certainly, if I was doing games for a cell phone, I’d rather work in JavaFX than in freaking Objective C.

as soon as javaFx comes and in 5 years all apllications will be made as a Web service …. this is why javaFx is important : to ease production and make those applicaton as bautifull help Applcati

So many angry statement have been made toward javaFx. But even if I do agree many small thing were not ready for prime time in 2008, today the sky is clearing up for us java Rich Client Web services.
We will be able to be pround of our user (good looking) interface. Good guis make happy users.

When Microsoft went into the game market, they did so like Napoleon. … Adobe builds a user friendly IDE and pushes the hell out of it, slaving themselves to their developers and carving a much needed niche for themselves online. Sun, instead, creates an interesting platform and wonders why the world has not beat a path to them. Well, now you know why that doesn’t work.”

It’s as if Sun can’t decide if they want to be in the consumer business or not. The culture of the company seems to resist it. The mentality is geared toward the big enterprises. When Gosling first thought up Java, back in 1990, he was thinking of consumer applications – a language that could bind together the house of the future, which would be full of digital machines needing a common interface. But Sun took the language and offered it to the big enterprises.

At this point I’ve zero faith that Sun can ever develop a consumer product, or a development platform that is suited to the kind of designers who understand, and develop for, the consumer.

I’ve been thinking, for programming phones, maybe hecl is the way to go.

“please don’t pretend you are competing with Flash/flex if you build a platform impenetrable to the designer developer”

For this reason alone, I don’t see how JavaFX can ever gain market share as a platform for games. The game industry falls into two groups:

1.) Massive, multi player real time games that, for the sake of speed, need to be written in C.

2.) Simple games that can be created by a designer in Flash.

If JavaFX proposes to compete with #2, it would need to come up with a vastly simpler programming GUI. As you say, a true GUI builder, not drag n drop coding.

As someone coming to the picture with no real history about Sun and only a Sunday Flash developers’ attachment to flash and none to Flex, I have to say the environment is quite interesting and promising. But it does seem that there is not the kind of effort in FX that I expect from the commercial platform it competes with.

For one thing, the platform is obviously targeted at games; however there is no 3D. How come processing can pull off 3D but JavaFX can’t? If you are developing for games you don’t make 3D a promised upcoming addition — you make it work by launch or you don’t launch at all.

Similarly if you truly expect to compete with flash, you don’t settle for a drag N drop code builder — you build a GUI frontend. As a programmer with years of experience I am okay with the current tactic but please don’t pretend you are competing with Flash/flex if you build a platform impenetrable to the designer developer. It just makes you look out of touch.

I’ve been casually watching Sun for years and adopted and discarded Java fairly early on (as in the minute I found out how much more efficient PHP was in the web context) and I have to say, there is something to be said for the competitive spirit. If your programming language slows projects to a crawl, strip down your language — now, not twelve years after the marketplace has had time to pidgenhole you (with Groovy). You don’t let a reinterpretation of PERL (the most hated language in history) do it for you.

After ten years of developing in PHP I have got a taste for OOP and I do like using it in Java — and I do like the NetBeans IDE. However I know for a fact that a lot of developers do a lot of good and interesting work on the way to OOP, which is why I believe Drupal, a quasi-OOP CMS, will dominate the next century of online app design. Sun took the tactic of asserting, “Only OOP development is valid, so we are going to create the best darn OOP environment, and if you can’t ‘get it’, or take a long time to ‘get it’, fine.” That is not a realistic way to treat developers, and while I have only praise for the converted, I have to say it hasn’t played very well in the field.

So here I am, making money during the day with PHP and making games at night with JavaFX. Frankly, it is a very FUN way to make games, for a highly experienced developer. But I would hate to take a stab at JavaFX when I was younger and lets face it, probably in a much better mental position to make really cool games.

In my experience, two types of people make games:

1. The radiantly brilliant low level coder who writes C++ for fun, really “Gets” openGL, and reeks from wearing the same clothes for a week straight
2. The guy who sees the “Don’t taze me dude” video and thinks, “I have GOT to put a game up about that on my blog!”

The first guy will NOT put up with a 2D platform, and the second guy will not get JavaFX without a full fledged interactive GUI. So you have in JavaFX a platform for guy 3 — a Java Programmer who doesn’t miss 3D or a GUI and probably doesn’t write games because he makes too much money at his six figure corporate job.

So thanks, Sun — I may be your only JavaFX user, but I really do appreciate your willingness to create a platform for me. I may be the only person who uses it, and honestly I’m using it partly because I want to be guy 3, but it really is an intersting if somewhat Altzheimic stab at a pretty lucrative market.

When Microsoft went into the game market, they did so like Napoleon. They created Microsoft Games, the X-Box, and some fairly big games like flight sim which has been a benchmark game series. Adobe builds a user friendly IDE and pushes the hell out of it, slaving themselves to their developers and carving a much needed niche for themselves online. Sun, instead, creates an interesting platform and wonders why the world has not beat a path to them. Well, now you know why that doesn’t work.

I love Java from an aesthetic point of view. It does a great job of forcing you to think structurally, is very flexible and adaptive, and did a good job of making C an anachronism. I am just sorry it was presented by a company that really doesn’t understand that a good, and I’m even willing to say great, language is not enough to make your way in the world — you have to make it relevant to the developer and market you wish to see it in and make sure that it is approachable to low level developers as well as veteran programmers. The same is true in an implementation like JavaFX — and you have to go the extra mile when Flex and Flash have really gone the extra mile for years in the field you want to capture.

I’m looking into using scala instead for applets at the moment.

But wouldn’t it be cool if there was an android browser plugin (for online games, etc.) and also even an apache module (which spawns a new jvm for each process sort of like php). No more separate java server required like (tomcat), so that shared hosting providers could finally support java/android development in addition to php.