Can You Build an RIA Platform Without Designers?

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That’s the question Sun seems to be asking the world with their announcement of JavaFX, a Java-based runtime that is meant to compete with Ajax, Flash, Silverlight and the other RIA technologies.

Mike Potter nails this pretty well, but the gaping void in this news is that JavaFX doesn’t really come with a designer story. Sure, Java developers have an “easier” way to write Swing interfaces, but when your starting point has a degree of difficulty of 900, “easier” is a relative term.

Without the designer story this thing is dead in the water. There may be some traction in the mobile world (that’s where it seems to be mostly targeted) but actually building desktop or web applications? Doesn’t seem compelling for anyone.

[tags]JavaFX, Swing, Ajax, Sun[/tags]

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  • http://www.innerfuse.biz/blog Weyert

    Yep, JavaFX looks too much oriented to the developer then the designer. The language ain’t that hard (at first sight) but still the designer in me prefers authoring tools like Expression Studio or Flash to make stuff.

    Nicely, integrated with tools like PhotoShop or Illustrator would be even nicer.

  • http://www.riapedia.com/ Mike Potter

    I was suprised that they seemed to miss this. Even their demo (Space Invadors) is lame. import 4 gifs, that should be good enough to create a rich Internet application.

    BTW: Sun is referring to it as Rich User to User Applications. Should I register ruuapedia.com?

    Mike