Microsoft are going to release the “Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit”. This will allow them to build desktop appz, much like Adobe is doing with AIR. As soon as they do that, I think Silverlight and Flex have pretty much the same features for doing web and desktop development. I’m just wondering where JavaFX is?
During Devoxx I followed some JavaFX sessions. It looks promossing, but we’re already waiting for it for quite a while now. If the EU approves the Sun acquisition, Oracle could finally publicly announce their intentions with all the Sun Products. I actually think they will start pushing JavaFX very hard, so hard it will have pretty much the same features as Flex and Silverlight within a couple of months. Probably the release of Java 7 will also be moved forward again. A while ago, I was very sceptic about JavaFX, but I’m allowed to change my opinion, right? I see many benefits for Oracle investing in JavaFX and make it a real competitor for Silverlight.
Or off course they will just kill JavaFX and buy Adobe, who knows. But for me a Java software developer, what frontend should I choose, what language should I invest in? I’ve already done some Flex development and it works really good. But I believe that the power behind Silverlight (Not only Microsoft, but all big component vendors) are giving Silverlight much more momentum. Just look at the number of components available for the platforms.
If Oracle would invest in JavaFX, I imagine they also would start contacting component vendors and ask them to start developing commercial components. As soon as that happens and we get more momentum, more developers will start developing opensource components as well.
I see this as the chicken and the egg problem, so come on EU let Oracle lay its egg so we as a software community know what we should do.