JD on EP

General observation: The story isn't told as clearly and concisely as it might have been... they use words like "impactful" in the marketing materials, which is always a clue to fluff....

Historical trivia: Schwartz used the phrase "Write Once, Run Anywhere", which was descended from Macromedia Director's earlier Author Once, Play Anywhere.

Context: Mary Jo Foley had a piece yesterday with some Sun exec quotes implying a relationship to Flash, but unfortunately it seems a parallel effort, with slightly different destination, rather than a useful synergy. Don Burnette has an article this morning which mentions "conversion utilities for translating Flash and SVG files into the JavaFX format" (FLA? SWF? MXML? FLV?), but that's the only Flash connection I've seen yet.

Semantic trivia: Sun correctly describes "RIA" as Rich Internet Application, rather than Rapid Interaction API or some other attempted neologism. :)

Tooling: Some articles describe an authoring tool ("Java FX intends to allow application architects to craft online applications by dragging and dropping images, eliminating the need to manually write code. They will be able to create animated buttons, for instance, by dragging images directly from [Adobe] Photoshop."), but anecdotal reports from JavaONE show floor seem to negate this... I'll try to resolve this discrepancy later today.

JavaFX Script seems to have the clearest story so far. It's a new scripting language used to declare interfaces. It isn't high-level XML, like Flex's component-oriented MXML, or a lower-level drawing XML, like SVG or even XAML... it's script, sent down to the runtime.

From the FAQ: "JavaFX Script is a declarative, statically typed programming language. It has First-class functions, declarative syntax, list-comprehensions, and incremental dependency-based evaluation. It can make direct calls to JavaAPIs that are on the platform. Since JavaFX Script is statically typed, it has the same code structuring, reuse, and encapsulation features (such as packages, classes, inheritance, and separate compilation and deployment units) that make it possible to create and maintain very large programs using Java technology."

Apparently the advantage lies in manipulating higher-level constructs... a faster way to develop, less low-level than straight Java programming... I haven't seen any new abilities for the Sun runtimes announced here, just refinements of ways to do existing things.

Also: "JavaFX Script will be open sourced. The governance, licensing, and community models will be worked out as product release draws closer."

The Language Guide seems surprisingly short, and focuses more on language functions than on primitives or components (seems like JFX can invoke Swing UI components, but doesn't have its own).... after reading it, I'm wondering whether they gave it the name "JavaFX" because the name "JavaScript" was already taken. The Language Guide is the best "what is it?" resource I've seen so far, but seems slight to me.

What runs on the mobile devices? I'm not sure yet... it sounds like there's an additional "JavaFX Mobile" layer (750K?) which can float above the core "Java Micro Edition" runtimes installed on most phones. I'm not certain if it reduces the variance among the world's JME runtimes -- it's usually testing and single-casing which adds the cost to Java mobile work -- so far, from what I'm reading, it sounds like JFM acts as a local meta-engine for handling JFS instructions. The desktop Java client, Java Standard Edition, apparently can interpret these JFS instructions without the intermediary layer which mobiles require.

Schwartz implied some type of desktop management function for different devices, which would imply some type of server functionality, but I haven't found docs discussing this area yet.