So today Sun announced JavaFX. Curiously, lots of people are hailing it as “The end of AJAX” …
Details are fairly sketchy at the moment, but from what I can tell JavaFX is basically just a scripting language for the SWING GUI library, with a few libraries thrown in to let it accommodate “Rich Internet Applications”.
Dont get me wrong, it will be great to have a really lightweight way to create simple cross-platform cross-device Java applications with a cute declarative syntax, but is this really going to kill AJAX? Lets have a look at just one key quote from Rich Green, Sun executive vice president of software:
It is a means of creating visually impactful, high-performance, dramatic Web and network-facing artifacts or experiences …
Whoa - hold it right there. Maybe I am mistaken but isn’t the whole point of AJAX about moving data around asynchronously? Did I miss the sister object to XMLHttpRequest called XMLDramaticExperienceRequest?!
Maybe I am just looking at this from a techie’s point of view, but I see “AJAX” purely as a nice, lightweight (it doesn’t have to be part of a 30K javascript “framework”…) way to move data around to do fairly cool things with web pages. Sure this can be used for “multimedia” (shudder), but this is not what its all about.
As I said, there is seemingly very little information available now - the only examples I could find were apparently early examples and required me to use that old clunky Java web start beast, requiring me to sit for a moment waiting for the JRE to grind into life . Its not a good sign - Java applications and applets using SWING are notoriously slow to load, and I really cannot see this catching on if this continues, but I look forward to giving it a closer look in the future anyway.