Java – Pros and Cons of JavaFX and Silverlight

javajavafxsilverlight

I know there is already a question about the performance of Flex, JavaFX, and Silverlight. My question is a bit more broad:

We are evaluating the merits of JavaFX and Silverlight to serve as the GUI technology that controls/configures our back-end service (currently written in Java). The service and GUI are usually on the same machine, but remote management (via browser) must also be supported. We are currently split into 2 teams: one .Net and one Java, although the Java developers also have some .Net experience.

As I see it, the pros & cons are currently the following:

Silverlight 4:

Pros:
- Excellent IDE integration
- Good developer-designer workflow
- Performance
- Extensive 3rd-party support (tools, controls, etc)
- Lots of momentum and drive from Microsoft
- Very good out-of-browser integration
Cons:
- Only supported on Mac & Windows (Moonlight support is not up to standard)

JavaFX 1.2:

Pros:
- Wide platform support
Cons:
- Only supports Latin character sets (at this time)
- Fewer designer tools
- ~~Little or no out-of-browser integration~~. Update: apparently there is out-of-browser support.
- Performance (at least on the demos I viewed at www.javafx.com)
- Maturity

Please let me know if I'm missing anything or mistaken about something, and what else I haven't considered. We also looked at Adobe AIR, but ruled it out because all our developers already have experience in Java and/or .Net.

Please don't start any flame wars here. This is not a religious question, and I really would like some practical advice and facts.

Best Answer

I have been playing around with JavaFX the last months and i would not recommend anyone to start using it unless the limitations (like lack of Linux support) are too harsh. The IDE support for JavaFX is ridiculous at the moment. You have no refactoring help, no autoformat and not even help with indentaion.

I like JavaFX and will continue to play around with it, but for 2 equally good languages, the huge IDE different is hard to overcome.

Silverlight has got Expression Blend as well, for (kind of) WYSIWYG.

I think a solution in JavaFX would be better, but creating it will probably be alot more difficult.

Related Solutions

.net – Silverlight vs Flex

I think you should look at Silverlight as a long-term play, just as Microsoft seems to be doing. There's an obvious balance on when to use Silverlight vs. Flash when you're concerned about reach and install base, but here are some reasons Silverlight is a good direction to move in:

Second mover advantage - Just as Microsoft built a "better Java" with .NET, they're able to look at how you'd design a RIA plugin from scratch, today. They have the advantage of knowing how people use the web today, something the inventors of Flash could never have accurately guessed. Flash can add features, but they can't realistically chuck the platform and start over.
Developer familiarity - While Silverlight is a new model, it's not entirely unfamiliar to developers. They'll "get" the way Silverlight works a lot more quickly than they'll understand firing up a new development environment with a new scripting language and new event paradigms.
Being rid of the timeline model in Flash - Flash was originally built for keyframe based animations, and while there are ways to abstract this away, it's at the core of how Flash works. Silverlight ditches that for an application-centric model.
ScottGu - ScottGu is fired up about Silverlight. Nuff said.
Cool new features - While Silverlight still has some catching up to do with Flash on some obvious features (like webcam / mic integration, or 3d / graphics acceleration), there are some slick new technologies built in to Silverlight - Deep Zoom is one example. I'm seeing more "revolutionary" technologies on the Silverlight side, while Flash seems to be in maintenance mode at this point.

Java – reflection and why is it useful

The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself).

For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to.

So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :

Method method = foo.getClass().getMethod("doSomething", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);

One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test.

There are some good reflection examples to get you started at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html

And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically typed languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common.

Update from a comment:

The ability to inspect the code in the system and see object types is not reflection, but rather Type Introspection. Reflection is then the ability to make modifications at runtime by making use of introspection. The distinction is necessary here as some languages support introspection, but do not support reflection. One such example is C++