Yakov Fain's Blog

Where have you been yesterday?
I was at a concert listening to Pavarotti
Is he really that good?
Nothing special, let me sing some of his songs for you.

Since I am not there, I can only write comments on comments of people who actually heard the concert. Cay Horstmann is Java Champion and he keeps good notes at JavaOne and here’s his Coverage of Day Two.

Cay has attended the JavaFX  presentation, and I can’t stop myself from commenting on some of Cay’s notes on Chris Oliver’s statements.

1.” The language is interpreted; it will be compiled at some later point.”
I see two issues here – until it’s compiled it’s pretty much useless – I’d rather use GWT framework to generate un-compiled JavaScript. When at some later point it will be compiled, the speed of its runtime engine becomes the most important thing.

2.  “It is statically typed.”
Why a scripting language should be statically typed?  

3. “Any Swing component can also be included.”
And this spells big problems to me. This means that the runtime engine will stay large to be able to accommodate all Swing libraries. But the larger problem is this – if you want to make a tool for development rich Internet applications, you do not take last-century-look-and-feel Swing components and bring them to the Web. But you hire the best GUI designers that start with creating modern-look-and-feel-eye-candy-light-weight-freaking-GUI-components, and then write an API to work with them on the Web.

4. Data Binding. “That's how one avoids the writhing mess of listeners. According to Chris, data binding is not a part of any mainstream language”.
I really hope that Chris just said it on purpose, to make his baby stand out. Cause if he did not know that data binding has been nicely implemented in ActionScript 3 programming language and MXML markup long time ago, his credibility goes down.

5. “Whatever you can do in Flash, you can do in Java. JFX gives you a faster way of expressing it.”
Wow, quite of a statement, but I have my reservations.

The consumer Java SE is expected in mid-2008. This does not sound too exciting. One very respected Java person made a really funny comment yesterday, “If only we could ask Adobe and Microsoft to stop their development for a year to allow Java to catch up to the point they are both at now (well in Flash's case, to catch up to the point they are were at a few years ago!)”. Well said.

If you’ve attended one of the recent JavaOnes, you’d really have enjoyed the organization of this event. The general sessions usually run in a HUGE hall that can easily accommodate at least ten thousand people; the stage has HUGE monitors; the sound is excellent. This really helps to make any announcement sound really important. But in a couple of days all the amps will be unplugged, the monitors will be boxed, and we’ll need to take another and more sober look at what are we left with.

tags: javaone
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