Back home after a two day trip to a nearby State.
I am really not going to talk about the Mono + C# initiative or about the XAML + Javascript initiative of Microsoft. There are opposing performance comparisons between C# on Mono and Java Swing.
Google came up with a wonderful idea called the Google Web Toolkit. Just code Java and you have a powerful Gmail-like AJAX applications coming handy. But as I said in my previous post, it is still Javascript.
After a long time, there are a few things happening in the Swing circles. Like the Aerith. Believe it or not, the following screenshot is a Swing based application.
But Aerith is just a mash up of a few popular webservices and definitely not near to the term “alternative”. While talking about Aerith, we also need to talk about the “very” late adoption of newer versions of Java. I dont know about you. But still, I code in Java 1.4. Its been around two years since Java 5.0 has been release. And Mustang is already released. Though, unlike .NET, Java provides complete backward compatibility, there is very little or no upgradation of JDKs. One pestering example for “Why not upgrade?” is the “enum” keyword.
Comparing upgradation of Flash with Java — Flash runtime comes with every browser. Lightweight. And 50% of the browsers upgrade to the latest version of the engine within the first month and within a year there is 100% migration of the plugin. Best of all, Cross-platform. As someone rightly quoted, “Java is everywhere but not everything”. So, its time we have a new perspective that is away from “All Java”. A kind of mix-up of technologies similar to the mashups that currently rock the web.
Flash is good. But not everybody does Flash. It requires skilled professionals to play with it. And, personally, designing a webpage using HTML and CSS is complicated. Adobe realised this and came up with what is called as the Flex. Now, ActionScript and the MXML components are the only thing that you would want to learn to design very attractive front ends. ActionScripting looks easier to Java and object-oriented programmers. MXML tags just look like our normal component tags that we write in Struts and JSF. MXML is also written in ActionScript. So, just in case you need customization, you can write your own tag components !!! Best of all, all your backend Java code is safe. So, you would essentially design your pages using Flex and invoke your Java code.
This video, you should never miss. Drives you crazy on what Flex could do.
Flex 2.0 is the current version and is downloadable for free at http://www.flex.org/. There is an online Flex compiler for instant experimentation. Here is a wonderful screencast that is available on how to use Flex as a front-end for Java server applications. And if you want to play with Flex, here is the link. Flex has an IDE built on Eclipse ;-) which currently has only the commercial flavor. I am sure, they would soon come out with an opensource alternative. However, there is also an IDE called Flexible you can play with.
Apart from Flex, Adobe also came up with Apollo to develop desktop applications using Flex/HTML/Javascript on the front end and Java/Python/Ruby/C# in the backend. However, Apollo is in its 1.0 version and is currently supported only in Windows and Mac platforms. They are currently working on Linux and other platforms too.
Here is an example of what Apollo could do.
Tags: aerith, apollo, flash, flex, java, swing
