Flex Sells

I just attended a session here at OSCON squaring off a couple of new Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies: Sun’s JavaFX and Adobe Flex. Nandini Ramani of Sun and James Ward of Adobe were on hand to demo their respective approaches.

As I understand it, JavaFX is Java but better integrated with other web technologies. The original pitch for Java was as a way to run multiplatform code on a webpage. As it transpires, it had its clock cleaned by JavaScript and Flash, and has found far more success as a server-side technology. Nandini plausibly suggested that one of the biggest barriers to adoption has been the inadequacies of Java graphics frameworks such as Swing. Now Sun is giving it another go, using HTML as the UI language with lots of whiz bang script goodness. The result looks a lot like, well, Flash.

This is certainly a big improvement. The only problem is that Adobe has moved on, and the Flex demos were nothing short of jaw-dropping. James kept muttering mea culpas to the effect that “I’m not sure why anyone would actually want to do this,” but who cares when flipping the pages of a virtual book that overlay as transparencies or run live video looks so damn cool? He made a big deal about Adobe’s Tamarin scripting engine, which has been open sourced and donated to the Mozilla project. Thanks to just-in-time compilation, it apparently runs tens or even hundreds of times as fast as old school JavaScript.

Bottom line: If JavaFX is Sun’s last gasp in the web client space then they have their work cut out for them. When the session ended, James was mobbed by adoring open source geeks as Nandini looked on forlornly.

Seeing these sexy demos steeled my resolve to soup up the AllPeers user interface with some sort of RIA technology. As a Mozilla shop, the natural inclination would be to explore the use of more open technologies like SVG or simply HTML and JavaScript. (Am I still allowed to call it DHTML?) But Flex has the indisputable attraction of building on tried-and-true Flash and has a slick Eclipse-based IDE. I asked some Mozilla folks at their booth what they thought, and they said “try both”. Hopefully I’ll be able to free up some of our UI people’s cycles to do exactly that, in which case I’ll be reporting back here with our conclusions.

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3 Comments »

1. Those demos will be doable in principle in Gecko 1.9 (if we get landed) using HTML and SVG — they’re just clever use of gradients, transformations, masks and clipping — but our graphics performance probably won’t be good enough to make them work well. That’ll have to wait for another release.

   Comment by Robert O'Callahan — 7/27/2007 @ 2:09 am

2. Man, OSCon is so full of open source sellouts. When I was there a couple of years ago on the Mozilla as a platform panel half the attendees were on Windows or Mac machines. Now they’re excited about *Flash*?

   I wish we did have their flashiness though. I was trying to sell the Mozilla story at GUADEC in Birmingham last week but we’re just not quite bling enough. At least those guys weren’t seduced by Flash.

   I’ve tried building some stuff in SVG, but even on 1.9 its too slow, and we don’t have either SVG animation support or support for SVG properties in animation libraries like jQuery.

   Comment by Ian McKellar — 7/27/2007 @ 2:50 am

3. I work with with XUL/JavaScript and ActionScript 3/Flex everyday. I can definitely say that each have their strengths and weaknesses.

   One of the things I like so much about the Flash Platform has been the dedication by Macromedia/Adobe to the platform. They’re not about to let Flash Player or AIR “take flight” as it were, or find a “new, separate organizational setting”. Their application runtimes *are* some of their best products.

   The adoption rates, and trust that the general public has with the Flash Player are awesome too. It will be exciting if they can pull the same thing off with AIR.

   Comment by enefekt — 7/27/2007 @ 1:35 pm

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