One of your own contributing writers on the JFX preview not more than four months ago:

"The demos available online are similarly underwhelming...find your way through the bizarre javafx.com website (which obeys no usability guidelines) and you may eventually stumble upon their demos page..two extremely minimal demos...the poster-child demo involves some underwhelming squares being drawn - the sort of thing that could be done in Flash years ago... "

So, now we have a multi-video and multi-audio-stream applet that can be dragged out of the browser, placed on the desktop without so much as a glitch - with respect, it's obvious to me that you're doing your best to blow off the clearly quite considerable advances JFX has made in the intervening months. How about some kudos where it's due, hmm? :)

I was left extremely impressed by the JFX 1.0 demos - looks like Sun has come out of left field to land a serious contender for the RIA devlopment crown.

http://www.javafx.com/samples/VideoPuzzle/index.html

BTW, now that JFX 1.0 has been delivered, I wonder we can all make an effort to quit moaning/continuing to use "JFX is late to the game" as a criticism :)

ps: screw Flash!

It's self screwing. Flash is the most common cause of my browser dieing, followed closely by viewing a PDF file. The third most common cause is so far behind as to not even matter.

Typically, every article on the The Register that is related to Java seems to be set in a negative tone, even in this article the 'performance'-dead horse is beaten once again, even though the real Java performance was greatly improved with Java 1.3 (about 10 years ago!) and since then only improved incrementally with a tweak here and there. It looks like that The Register has never actually done any real work with Java.

" It looks like that The Register has never actually done any real work with Java." ... By Avalanche Posted Sunday 7th December 2008 11:39 GMT

Its readers though are QuITe Proficient with ITs Virtual Machinery Interface ..... Content Flow Control/Buffer OverLode Supply. ....... and/but of course not everything Supplied to the Register is always Shared with the Internet. And in some cases that Results in Missing Intelligence Links in a Greater Thread, which only Hinders Third Party Understanding of Further First Degree Virtually Real Actions Shared .... for Transparent Peer Review and Comment. ..... aka Virtual Guidance in CyberIntelAIgents.

But the Links are always still there, somewhere in the Cloud ....... Making Life Giving Rain.

About only thing I really miss in JavaFX is some sort of cool-looking GUI framework to replace old Swing stuff with modern, vector, animated forms. As a programmer, I will *never* paint my GUI in Adobe Illustrator (as Sun suggests to JavaFX developers) or do some crazy stuff like that... Thats how web-ads are done, but not how serious apps (enterprise or not) are done.

java just auto updated itself a week ago and screwed my pc-hogging cpu time every time I started a browser..I uninstalled it.I have not missed it or needed it .

It's the music equivalent of "Java is slow" and just as untrue.

".....create an ecosystem..."

You are the Antichrist and I claim my five pounds.

The exciting thing for me (as Java developer who has been forced down the Flex route for the last year) is that Sun have provided a modern mechanism for building GUIs that finally match what Adobe and Microsoft are doing.

Sun-bashing seems to be fashionable, but there is not doubt that they have developed an exciting contender for the RIA market. Will it succeed? What most of the articles I've read have ignored is Java developer push on using new technologies that more closely match their skill set. Existing Java developers will want to use JavaFX because it is Java - in a few years, a developer's CV may well look incomplete without some JavaFX experience. And that alone is a powerful force for JavaFX adoption in SMEs (what do managers know about technology?).

Delivering video has greatly increased the install base for Flash Player; I expect Sun are hoping it will do the same for the Java VM.

In terms of the enterprise...well, we have some banking customers who are still using Java 1.5 and Flash Player 7 as standard. Some of these machines are re-built every night, so it it's not in the standard machine image, the user isn't going to use it. That means that not only is the latest Java not usable, neither is the latest Adobe Flex offering. Silverlight doesn't even appear on the radar.