Tech Forum

Carl,

Excuse my ignorance, but do I understand correctly that JavaFX is designed for developing web applications, and is not also useful for building local desktop apps that run outside a browser? Is there an equivalent to the Adobe AIR environment for RIA desktop apps?

And is there a potential issue with end users needing to install a runtime plug-infor the web apps to execute? My understanding is that Flash-enabled web sites do require users to install the Flash plug-in from Adobe, but Adobe has achieved a very large market penetration among end-users

Actually, I don't think cost of development is as big of a deal as hosting perhaps, especially for us community members. I agree it's probably not as big of a deal to the Church itself.

With Silverlight, you can develop a Silverlight app for free using an one of the Express editions of Visual Studio. There is a very expensive complimentary application for designers however. With Flash I think you can develop for free, but haven't seen a full-fledged free IDE. It would be nice to have JavaFX come in with its free offerings as well.

But even though you can develop Silverlight for free, I think hosting and cross-platform compatibility would be the issues. It seems you can only host Silverlight on IIS? A benefit to Flash and JavaFX would presumably be the open-source hosting environments and cross-platform compatibility.

At the Church we don't do a lot of flash. We are starting to do a lot of JQuery, however, which is a free Javascript/Ajax library.

Tom

JavaFX has now been launched for those who don't already know.

I expect as it is a version 1.0 that it may well have some performance problems or potentially bugs. I notice that some of the JavaFX apps can take a while to load though this might be that lots of people are rushing to check JavaFX out and this is slowing things down, ....or it could just be slow. When the applications get running though they are impressive.

tomw wrote:At the Church we don't do a lot of flash. We are starting to do a lot of JQuery, however, which is a free Javascript/Ajax library.

Tom

Perhaps they don't add up to "a lot", but the Church Music sub-site, the front page of mormon.org, perhaps more of mormon.org, and all the training at New FamilySearch are in Flash.

rmrichesjr wrote:Perhaps they don't add up to "a lot", but the Church Music sub-site, the front page of mormon.org, perhaps more of mormon.org, and all the training at New FamilySearch are in Flash.

Yes, it is true that mormon.org and FamilySearch do use Flash. I guess what I meant to say was that any projects that we would enlist the community on (at least currently on our radar) would not involve flash.

Tom