Why I'm perplexed about 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.

Xebia Web Framework Contest

What's the best Web Framework for developing RIA applications?

That's the question people at Xebia France tried to answer through their contest

Competitors were:

• Flex 3
  
• Silverlight beta 2
  
• Google GWT
  
• Echo 3
• Java FX

The clear winner was Flex 3. It's worth noting that at the moment Java FX is still immature.