Coach Wei's Blog

(May 8, 2007) - Quite a few people are asking me what I think of Sun's JavaFX announcement. It is funny and we saw this coming - Who wouldn't anticipate Sun to make some big announcement at JavaOne? People were predicting the announcement is going to be "open sourcing Java" - Oh, no, that was last year :-)

It is quite amazing that rich internet application is suddenly getting so much attention. Adobe has been pushing Flash as a platform. Microsoft is pushing .NET via Silverlight, and now  Sun is positioning the Java Platform for RIA via this JavaFX announcement. Of course, we all know the Ajax Wildfire.

All of these establish that RIA is the next generation application paradigm. Over the last 20 months,  press has been dominated by Ajax and Flash. Microsoft’s Silverlight announcement tells the world not to ignore .NET. Java pioneered rich web applications years ago, and this JavaFX announcement firmly reinvigorates Java as a platform of choice for RIA.

It is clear that the RIA technology landscape is going to be heterogeneous with four technologies: Ajax, Java, .Flash and .NET. Each of them has its own strength and weakness. No single technology is going to be able to dominate the entire world. Being a single technology shop, eg.100% Ajax shop or 100% .NET,  is going to be an exception rather than the norm.  Different customers, or different applications within the same customer environment, or even different parts of the same application, will and should choose appropriate technologies among Ajax, Java, Flash or .NET, depending on requirements and skill sets, etc.

BTW: I wrote on this subject in a few lengthy articles a year ago. See:

Given that Nexaweb was recognized as a company in the RIA space, some people asked me what this means to Nexaweb.

At Nexaweb, we are excited about where the industry is heading to and where we are.

Nexaweb developed its Universal Client Framework (UCF) precisely for the reason that we realized Ajax, Java, Flash and .NET are going to co-exist as technologies for RIA. Instead of being a pure Ajax framework, Nexaweb UCF supports Ajax, Java, Flash and .NET. With Nexaweb UCF, customers can use a combination of Ajax, Java or Flash to build and deploy applications, all in a coherent and well design model and with unified visual tooling. The capability for customers to mix and match Java, Ajax and Flash etc in a fully integrated and coherent  methodology for different applications, or within the same application, gives customers great flexibility as well as incredible productivity increase.

I think of Nexaweb UCF as an “RIA assembly platform” that enables customers to assemble rich internet applications using a variety of technologies (Ajax, Java, Flash etc) and connect to enterprise data and business processes via SOA – with unified methodology and visual tooling. The JavaFX announcement just reinforces this positioning and the need for RIA assembly platform …

So from the above, I applaud the JavaFX announcement.

Finally, I will summarize my thoughts on what this means, in particular, what it means to customers, here:

From Nexaweb's perspective, here is how I see it: