Comments on: Desktop, browser and RIA – interview with Chet Haase

By: Richard Osbaldeston

Richard Osbaldeston — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:39:35 +0000

Would’ve been nice to know where the timing framework and transitions libraries now stand. Is Chet going to maintain them or has a new project owner been found? Or have these been totally replaced by Scenegraph and JavaFX – which leaves Swing unsupported? (expect for scenegraph of course – but that’s not the most natural approach for a traditional Swing UI).

By: Olivier Allouch

Olivier Allouch — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:34:12 +0000

I don’t see much difference, for instance, between the responsibility of a commercial closed source project and an open source project. As users of an open source project, we are like clients (I stretch lines a bit here, I know).
Anyway, I can agree that Chet wasn’t Sun, only one of its main voices.
Maybe, if I knew exactly what part of the Consumer JRE or JavaFX he helped create, I could at least thank him for that.

Anyway, I take that opportunity to thank you for all your good work with Substance and all the good influence, I’m sure you have, on Sun. BTW, if you could add more pressure for a new Swing, based on painter, and SwingX components and CellRenderers design, with a simple API like in ActionScript 3 (you should take a look at it)… :) I really thought Amy Fowler’s JDNC was a good idea. We’ll kinda have that new API with FX.

By: Kirill Grouchnikov

Kirill Grouchnikov — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:47:32 +0000

Olivier – then we’ll agree to disagree. I do believe that when you do it for the living, you owe the explanation only to your family, and when you do it on your own free time, you owe the explanation to nobody.

By: Olivier Allouch

Olivier Allouch — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:09:08 +0000

Actually, I think he does. If you stop contributing to the community like you do, I hope you’ll give us an explanation :)

By: Paulo Pinto

Paulo Pinto — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:48:15 +0000

Hi Kirill,

I understand that, and no one has to give explanations of his/her private life to strangers.

But sometimes people are inspirations for other developers, like myself. And I was surprised with the decision, maybe a bit disappointed, to see a great developer leaving the Swing community.

But again, you’re right. He doesn’t how any explanation to the world at large.

By: Kirill Grouchnikov

Kirill Grouchnikov — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:18:41 +0000

Paulo,

That is his personal decision and he owns absolutely no explanation to anybody.

Kirill

By: Paulo Pinto

Paulo Pinto — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:41:26 +0000

I would also like to know why he decided to change.

If you read his blog entries looks that he used to be 100% for doing cool stuff in Java.

Then he abandons ship and goes to the Flex camp.

There is nothing bad with it, but the comunity that was lead to belive 2D expressiness of his Java examples would certanly appreciate an explanation.

By: Olivier Allouch

Olivier Allouch — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:03:13 +0000

A lot of generalities…
He’s in an awkward situation where he can’t really talk about concrete technologies, because he’s real job at Sun was to make Java compete with Flash using eye-candy animations.
He can make all the funny faces he wants, but he should have explained us his choice (or maybe I’ve missed it) before laughing with the Flex guys while showing them some code he’s migrated from Java. http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DS7LQkynyUpQ

His thoughts about JavaFX would have interested us. Is it another marketed-today-forgot-tomorrow-Sun-technology, or does JavaFX Script makes effects so easy there’s no point at working on it at Sun (or writing a book) ?

I personally prefer a library (like https://scenegraph-effects.dev.java.net/ ) than a book.

By: Richard Treadway

Richard Treadway — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:55:21 +0000

Thanks Kirill for publishing this insightful interview with Chet Haase. All too often we focus on the features of an RIA platform and which one is best for a particular application. In the process we loose sight of the fact that the high order bit is always the efficiency and understandability of the UI. Good UI design is the single most important factor contributing to overall ROI. While at Curl I’ve had the opportunity to visit with many of our enterprise customers like Paisley and Sony and in all cases the effectiveness of the application’s UI has been a significant element of their overall ROI.