The JavaFX Phone: The HTC Diamond
thebitsource.com
thebitsource.com
Looks pretty neat, actually, hooking into Photoshop etc. Wonder if this will take off...
Anyone have any experience about JavaFX?
[The page has a Java-based video player on it. Killed my browser for about 2 minutes, and needed a few prompts to start. Not that Java is slow or anything, but still. :) ]
It will be also used on Bluray discs.
I hope it will take off on mobile too. I've been playing with it for a while and I find it very easy to use and powerful.
You can see some interesting apps here: http://jfxstudio.wordpress.com/
Its still tied up to a lot of old Swing components for its underlying functionality. The browser plugin takes FOREVER to load and literally crashes safari on my mac.
Custom component development is difficult.
They introduced a new language called JavaFX script which alienates Java developers and offers not much in terms of new features.
Their "declaritive UI building" technique with the JFX script is ugly looking and unintuitive compared to flex MXML or silverlight XAML.
They still don't have a good WYSIWYG UI building tool.
It lags behind Flash in terms of installed base of the runtime.
Both Microsoft ( through expression studio ) and Adobe (flash catalyst) offers integration with photoshop and in the case of Flex, its an even closer level of integration through FXG.
Sun had the chance to change everything back then with applets, it failed and now JavaFX is too little and too late.
EDIT* and Flex is opensource too and IMO the code base is a lot more well written.
Perhaps on the cellphone it's different but then again what I saw in the video was no impressive by any metrics I would normally use.
The problem for Sun is that they are brilliant people producing rather brilliant products and concepts but they are simply amateurs when it comes to spreading them and getting people to adopt them.