Friday 9 May 2008

JavaOne2008. Thursday roundup

Wow what a week.

It seems like a long build up to the release of JavaFX and the new browser plugin and I can't wait for it to happen. As Jim mentions in his summary of day 3 I think there will now be a concern amongst AJAX followers that the technology is going to look dated. At the moment AJAX front ends that want to be really rich seem to rely too much upon Flash, look at Google Analytics - all the charts are Flash.

Even today AltioLive's Graph control that will be released in Altio 5.2 shows the power of Applet based technologies over JavaScript. There are several JavaScript based graph widgets but they tend to be slow when handling lots of data.

I strongly believe that Java 6 has again made Java Applets an option for consumer Rich Web Applications and can come out from hiding in the enterprise solution area, and JavaFX further strengthens the position of Java Applets as a solution.

I'm sure that if you talk to the Java SE team they will strongly disagree with the idea of JavaFX being "stillborn". Healthy competition between SilverLight, Flash, Applets and AJAX is required to provide end users with the best user experience possible.

If you want to see a real FilthyRich Web Application look at the AltioLive IDE, as Jim put's it we "Eat our own dog food" I don't believe a product can trully say it is good unless you can create an IDE using the underlying framework. I like Eclipse but there must be something wrong if AJAX and Flash don't have IDE's using their own technology. NOTE: there are some AJAX IDE's out there.

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