I wasn't able to attend JavaOne conference this year (May 5-9) - not that I've attended one before -, but I've been up to pace reading blogs, viewing JavaOne Pictures online and watching Videos related to JavaOne. From the various blogs I've read, people had this to say about this year's JavaOne conference; that it was more of JavaFX than anything else. try looking up http://java.dzone.com for some of the write-ups.
Everyone has been making efforts to be a major player in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space; talk of Microsoft with Silverlight/Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF), Adobe with Flex & AIR, Sun Microsystems with JavaFX. So far I've been very impressed with what has been done so far in the RIA space with Flex & AIR; http://www.flex.org/showcase bears me witness to this. I'm currently working for Quanteq Technologies Services Limited (www.quanteq.com), a consulting firm that solves ICT related performance problems for companies and organizations through IT Advisory, IT Project Management... One of the objectives I was supposed to meet up with was to embrace and develop with some new technologies and also recommend or research new and emerging technologies that would move the organization forward to realizing its Vision Statement. One of my team members suggested I try out Silverlight too since I was developing with C# (I just started when I resumed here; I've always been a Java guy), but I needed to see mouth-watering/amazing stuffs that people have done with Silverlight before taking the RED PILL. I didn't really see anything that would make me go crazy over Silverlight, but I eventually did see Lee Brilow's demos at http://www.thewpfblog.com, which were more than I bargained for. Silverlight is surely coming up, but it's still a kid beside its parent - Flash, but it surely has great capabilities for us in the near future which shows that Microsoft is also doing good in the RIA space.
Though I've been more of a Java guy in my development life, I've always been very skeptical about JavaFX. I've been following up with the technology just as its form was following function, since its inception when it was still F3, developed by Chris oliver then. I played around with it for some weeks, but eventually had to leave it because it was just too slow to startup. Even though Chris Oliver demoed some cute stuffs with it, I wasn't still impressed to take the plunge with it again.
I always joked with my Java friends that JavaFX was a dead technology. My perception has been that Sun was just trying to be a voice in the RIA space when they were not up to the task. Why don't they concentrate on the spaces where Java is a big force to reckon with rather than struggle in the RIA space that has almost been completely taken over by Adobe & Microsoft. Java has been doing really great in other spaces I must say, examples are Android (Google's new mobile platform), Adobe Flex Builder 3 (Built on Eclipse), BlazeDS (from Adobe too) and a host of all others.
But I was eventually proven wrong with the JavaOne video of 'Experimentating with JDK7 Features' which I saw. Men, there is really a great deal that Java is going to do in the RIA space. From On2's video capability been infused into JavaFX, Parley's website (http://www.parleys.com) being developed completely with JavaFX with amazing features and to hear about the future direction Parleys website is going to be taken to, to Joshua Marinacci's (One of my inspirers) demo, and then to the killer demo of Using Photoshop and Illustrator to pimp up a UI, export it as JavaFX code, then add more code to it with any JavaFX IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse to produce an amazing application. I was more than impressed to see this. What this simply means is that Designers can do their stuff in their tools of choice (Tools that they are conversant with), export it as JavaFX code and have Developers continue from there, which is more than enough. The JavaFX team has created a plugin for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for exporting your comps as JavaFX code.
I boldly say it not that Sun is really doing great by providing the community with great tools to use. JavaFX is set to rock the world.
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