JavaFX
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
Cedric Beust hates it. Sam Ruby thought that its Excel-like dynamic binding is pretty cool. Dare Obasanjo thought that having choices are good. Srikumar Subramanian over at Lambda The Ultimate thought that it reminded him of AppleScript.
I saw JavaFX back when it was known as F3. If you take a look it’s history, it was initially started as a DSL to build GUIs. Having databinding makes sense. The dynamic binding referred to by Sam Ruby might enable some interesting animation effects, for instance, animating a skeleton-like object, where position of objects depends on where the other linkages are. There are a few other features, like asynchrony, which will be useful in an animation-rich language.
However, I believe JavaFX could have done a better job of designing an animation language more like Scratch, where it is easy to read (or visualize) the many threads of interaction that may occur. Or having a language where transitions can be easily expressed (e.g. tweening and easing a shape). Instead of a DSL for laying out GUIs, JavaFX should have looked to languages like Simula, which would have expressed behaviours better.
What do you think? What are the opportunities that JavaFX has missed out on?
