Under My Palapa

The concept that JavaFx cannot be embedded into an existing Swing application baffles the mind. There were hacks to do this in 1.1, and I have it working in 1.2 (minus mouse events), but to not support this in the official API is one of the strangest things I’ve seen. This would be the #1 way to drive adoption of JavaFx, yet Sun seems to be blind to this fact. There are plenty of Swing apps that could be enhanced to have some nice eye-candy charts, etc.

Thanks to my employer, I’ll be attending JavaOne again this year. I enjoyed the experience last year, although it is a bit exhausting trying to maximize session attendance. Thankfully this year I can doubleteam the session lineup with a coworker, so I may feel less pressed to entirely fill my schedule with sessions I may not be interested in.

My favorite speaker last year was Ben Galbraiths, and in general the various talks dealing with Swing. Yes, that dead toolkit that people are abandoning for Adobe Flex. IMHO, the pendulum may ’swing’ back as people actually start trying to use Flex to build more complex applications.

Ultimately, I think we are pushing too much into the web browser. I want my web sites to be web sites, and my apps to be apps. I really don’t want a complicated user interface living inside of a web page. Finding this boundary is difficult, and pushing back on the people who ‘want it all’ is a tightrope that is difficult to walk. IMO, break out of the browser and into AIR if you want a complicated Flex app. Don’t shoehorn it into your website.