Flex & Java
jonr originally posted this on Jon Rose's Blog.
I just got done reading an interesting post by Gerard Mason on Flex & Java developers. He points to my post last year on the RIA Landscape and Flex. Near the end he states he surprised at the black lash on “in-browser” Java technologies:
So, yes, I wasn’t prepared for the degree of, frankly, hatred of in-browser Java that I found, even amongst ex Java developers. Like lovers who’ve been deceived, strung along, and humbled once too often.
While, I will point out that I still am a Java developer (not an ex), it has been a long-long time since I considered applets an option for web user interfaces (does anyone?). So, if you want to develop “rich” user interfaces Java has little to offer. Mason does cover this early in his post:
It seems that after a decade of Java programming, while Sun has more or less abandoned the browser and chased the server, people have finally given up waiting for usable in-browser technology…
Applets still look clunky, they still have funny fonts, they still take forever to load, as the browser has to load and run the complete JRE (at least)…
Well the market was Sun’s to lose, and they lost it; indeed, they seem not to have cared about it at all.
Sun is working on JavaFX, but the current trend line looks like the technology is going to be far too-little-to-late. Anyhow, Mason throws out a couple of questions/statements. First:
I’ve not done a lot of reading about Flex, but I haven’t heard anything about sandboxing.
From the context, I assume he means from a security perspective. He will have to flush out more on what he is looking for here, but it is worth noting that Flex applications run on the client side in a single threaded VM with limited OS permissions (i.e. the flash player). So, the needs are probably a bit different here than what he is use to in Java. In addition, I still rely on Java for all of my server-side business logic. So, I still have the full power of Java there.
Second, he states:
If Flex/Flash becomes the standard delivery mechanism for RIAs, Adobe will make a lot of money and we’ll all wish we had stayed free.
I am still a bit confused on how this is different from the Java world we have all lived in for so long. They have taken many of the same steps that Sun took to open-up Java (it did take Sun 10 years to really open source it). In addition, the player, flex sdk, and backend plumbing (BlazeDS) are all free. All you really need to pay for is the Flex Builder IDE. I have actually been wondering if Adobe is heading down the road of following Sun’s example of bringing the industry a quality platform, but never really figure out how to monetize it.