Sun, JavaFX and its future, JavaOne 2008, JavaOne 2009…

As many of you know, I was invited to JavaOne 2008 as Press Analyst by Sun Microsystems. I went all the way from India to attend the event. It was a very hectic schedule for me and throughout the event I was jetlagged. As such I wasn’t able to cover as much as I would have liked. The one thing which caught my eye most was the immense Sun hype over JavaFX. As an architect, it struck me as odd that they went all the way to invent a new language, what was essentially Javascript. I didn’t get a good feeling about the architecture, about the concept in general and I came away with the distinct impression of too-little-too-late.

At two presentations, I expressed my serious concerns about the technology:

Angsuman Chakraborty, CEO of Taragana, a software development outsourcing company based in West Bengal, India, asked the panel what turned out to be a central question of the discussion: Why, in the midst of this explosion, when we already have such popular dynamic scripters as Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP, did the world need Sun’s new scripting language, JavaFX Script?

“It’s just one more thing to learn,” Chakraborty said, “and with all these very similar languages, it becomes harder and harder for the developer to master each one.”

Source: Campus Technology

InfoWorld wrote an article on it:

This question was raised during the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Wednesday, with an attendee wondering why Sun needed to have its own scripting variant. JavaFX Script is part of Sun’s JavaFX rich Internet application platform, first announced a year ago but being filled out with product deliverables this year.

With JavaFX Script, Sun is offering up a scripting language very similar to what already was available, argued developer Angsuman Chakraborty, CEO of Taragana. It is hard for developers to learn another language, Chakraborty said.

“I don’t think they need another language,” Chakraborty said in an interview after first airing his views during a session with Sun officials. “It is an idiotic exercise, to put it bluntly. There is Groovy, there is JavaScript. All these languages are good enough and they can be molded into solving the needs of JavaFX.”

There were other coverage too in the media and I guess Sun’s executives weren’t too happy about seeing their baby trashed. Personally I love Java very much and by extension Sun, and not to mention I worked there in past. However I realized JavaFX was doomed to failure and a hare-brained scheme to put it politely.

JavaFX raises more questions than it answers and the executive’s reply wasn’t very convincing either. These people obviously haven’t heard about KISS and are happy to invent yet another language at every opportunity. You know how compiler designers like to create a compiler for solving every problem? It’s almost like that.

In the short period of JavaOne 2008, I wrote few articles on JavaFX. I would have written more was I not so jetlagged.

One year has passed and it is time for JavaOne 2009. I don’t see JavaFX has gained much traction during this period and I doubt it ever will.

On a sidenote, I wonder if Sun will have the courage to invite this gadfly once again for JavaOne 2009 who will obviously not accept any hare-brained scheme just because Sun or for that matter any other company is saying so. Only time will tell.