I've spent my free time over the last couple of days looking at Adobe's Flex technology, and the ecosystem surrounding it. I'd always known about Flash of course, and I'd read the occasional article on Flex, Flux, AIR or whatever Adobe is calling it nowadays (they seem to have a really high churn rate on products, or maybe it's just product names). But as a Java guy, I'd never been able to understand what was wrong with the good old applet — perhaps not the very oldest, AWT-based applets, but certainly the (slightly) newer Swing-based JApplets. Sure, the flash-based stuff looked good, but I didn't see anything I couldn't do with Java.
So I was in for a bit of a shock. Java, which let's remember invented the whole idea of sectioning off a rectangle of window and offering it as a UI to a program embedded in the web page, seems to have completely lost the minds and hearts of browser-side developers. Java developers of 10 or more years standing are saying that Flex is the way to go for RIAs (rich internet applications) now.
It seems that after a decade of Java programming, while Sun has more or less abandoned the browser and chased the server, people have finally given up waiting for usable in-browser technology. Sun let themselves be distracted by Microsoft, and failed to see that Adobe was quietly taking their market. Applets still look clunky, they still have funny fonts, they still take forever to load, as the browser has to load and run the complete JRE (at least)... Meanwhile the Flex developers have noted all these failings of Java and quietly ensured that Flash/Flex doesn't suffer from them.
Well the market was Sun's to lose, and they lost it; indeed, they seem not to have cared about it at all. I suppose you could say that Sun was a more server-oriented company, while Macromedia and Adobe were more desktop oriented. But Sun has always made workstations too... It's shocking really: for a fraction of what they must have spent buffing Java for the server, they could have licensed some decent fonts, told a few designers to make the graphics look sleek and sexy, and licensed a decent codec for movies. Instead they jumped aboard an ill-conceived server-side beans bandwagon and ended up producing the J2EE monstrosity — its latest addition, Java Server Faces, piling yet another badly designed, badly implemented and altogether half baked piece of cack on top of all the rest.
(I mustn't go on about JSF, but please, someone tell me, when the entire rest of the industry was conspicuously moving towards client-side processing, with first DHTML and then Ajax, why did Sun adopt a model where even little things like a combo box dropping down its list portion required a complete page refresh from the server? What idiot thought that was a good idea?) ... I'd better rest a while, and wipe some of the froth away from my mouth ... I'll be alright in a moment ...
So, yes, I wasn't prepared for the degree of, frankly, hatred of in-browser Java that I found, even amongst ex Java developers. Like lovers who've been deceived, strung along, and humbled once too often.
But serious questions remain. A long time ago, early on in browser-centric Java, Sun spent a lot of effort on the Java sandbox. A poorish initial implementation gave way to a flexible one with fine-grained permissions, one that eventually most people felt they could trust. I've not done a lot of reading about Flex, but I haven't heard anything about sandboxing. I understand that it does have one, but I haven't heard any discussion about how good it is. And then of course, the entire world + dog moaned at Sun to open source Java, and it's finally done someting about it. Beyond open sourcing the basic flex product, Adobe has kept all the value-add stuff and the flash player itself closed. If Flex/Flash becomes the standard delivery mechanism for RIAs, Adobe will make a lot of money and we'll all wish we had stayed free.
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