Choosing the right Tech for a New Project

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:18:00 GMT

For about a year now I've been sitting on a project idea. I've prototyped a few things out, written some stuff down. I've talked to a handful of colleagues about it. Lately it has become something I am more and more interested in doing. Over the last year I've had very little time to spare to anything extra and that is the main reason for it staying on the back burner as long as it has. Now that I'm ready to take a more serious look into its viability I'm beginning to wonder what technical direction to take and how best to make that decision.

JavaFX Too Late...But Who Cares

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:39:00 GMT

I think around 2005 AJAX crept into buzz worthy status. Book publishers were happy again. Eric Pascarello got to laugh at everyone for making fun of his love for JavaScript. Rich Internet Application became the defacto term for web 2.0. And developing web applications now meant knowing nearly 10 entirely different technologies. I'm not complaining. It has paid my bills as well.

Then, all of a sudden, and it seemed as if it were out of nowhere, Flex announced itself to the world. Microsoft counters with Silverlight. Sun realizes they dropped the ball, again, and started working on JavaFX. Here is how I remember it going down.

Macromedia announces Flex. Right out of the gate they had the FlexBuilder IDE, all the widgets you really needed, Data Service Providers, documentation, tutorials, evangalists. Adobe buys Macromedia and it gets even bigger. Flex goes open source. Everyone is talking about it. Book publishers get to make money again. Key Sun engineers leave Sun and go to work for Adobe. But where are the Flex driven applications? Where are the AIR applications? I'm sure some of you will drop a few links in the comments. But considering the number of blogs I read the the number of different kinds of websites I visit not only for fun but also to try and keep abreast of the latest and greatest going on in development, I have yet to run across a Flex driven web site.

On the heals of Flex Microsoft announces Silverlight. Support in the latest Visual Studio already there. Documentation, evangalists, controls, Data Service Providers, integration with all that is .NET. Book publishers are happy again. But where are all the Silverlight driven web sites/applications? Again, I haven't ran across any.

JavaFX announces itself to the world. There is an SDK you can download. Little to no documentation. No IDE support. Not even a beta version is available. A year later we have some documentation. A couple of books. Still no 1.0 release. Netbeans is the only IDE with true built in support. Doesn't work that great on Linux (even though Java is multiplatform). Obviously, no non-demo applications driven with JavaFX. The JavaFX website isn't even driven by JavaFX.

What does all this mean? Nothing really. These RIA technologies are popular the same way all these Web Frameworks are popular. Everyone thinks they are cool. Everyone blogs about them. In the real world, no one really uses them. They are all designed for cookie cutter web applications which we all know don't really exist.

With that said, FLAME ON!

Gregg Bolinger - ria tag

Choosing the right Tech for a New Project

JavaFX Too Late...But Who Cares