For those who are still in doubt about how powerful Flex/AIR are, I have here a little example that shows how to build a generic RSS reader in just about a hundred of line of code.
This program acquires the news from a user-provided RSS source, lists all the news and allows the user to dig into each news double clicking on it. It's based on the AS xml syndication library as3syndicationlib.
... I have some doubts about the feasibility of such a simple thing in JavaFX.
;-)
JavaFX 1.0 is finally out.
I took a look at the official website and I saw a lot of good-looking gadgets: a video player, a puzzle whose pieces are parts of a video, a stopwatch and a lot more.
It's seems JavaFX wants to compete with Adobe Flash in bringing some special effect to the user's desktop.
Frankly and honestly, Sun's solution doesn't impress me much: still applets are loading s-l-o-w-l-y, too slow compared with Flash counterparts. Moreover Linux is not supported yet. I see that JavaFX site shows only special effects, like rotating cubes and so on, but I don't see any "serious" component that could help the programmer to display and manage database data easily: that means, for instance, that if you want to display a resultset, JavaFX doesn't provide you with some kind of datagrid component (à la Flex) and you have to build your own by yourself.
Maybe my conclusion is too severe, but I think that from a user point of view Flash is more responsive than JavaFX and for a developer interested in building enterprise-class RIA applications JavaFX is just inadequate compared with Flex.
