Is one of my Java desktop 2008 wishes coming true?

January 24th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

I had only two things on my Java desktop wishlist for 2008 – cross-platform support for H.264 / FLV formats and converters / viewers for competing markup formats. To quote myself on the second wish

You know what i’m talking about – those pesky competitors that have 99.9% percent of the consumer-facing rich desktop market. Flash / SWF, Flex / MXML and WPF / XAML. Each has its own set of designer tools for creating rich content. Each has armies of professional designers versatile in using those tools, in addition to Photoshop, Maya and others. Do you really expect them to master yet another (unproven) designer tool?

If JavaFX wants to have a fighting chance, it needs to provide a simple migration path. A path that allows taking an existing Flex / Silverlight application and importing it to JavaFX (at least the visuals).

Is it possible that this is becoming a reality? Here is what James Gosling said to Register Developer during the Mobile & Embedded developer day:

We are putting a lot of effort into interoperability with the Adobe tools – a lot of the Adobe tools are wired into the neurons of the artists of the world, [...] We are not trying to be a completely isolated island that has all the tools for everybody.

Obviously, this is completely open to interpretation and speculation, and we’ll have to wait for the grand announcement(s) at this year’s JavaOne. My read on this is that Sun will provide a set of plugins to Adobe tools that will allow exporting art as JavaFX and SceneGraph code. And instead of focusing on creating visual tools for the designers, Sun will put the effort in the programmer’s half of the tool chain.

Only time will tell…

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3 Comments on “Is one of my Java desktop 2008 wishes coming true?”

  1. 1 Jo Voordeckers said at 3:32 am on January 25th, 2008:

    Although not perfect: FFMPEG manages to play some (most I tried) FLV formats. And it’s possible to interact with it from Java by using FOBS4JMF, I managed to get it working via Webstart on Win32, Linux and Mac(x86), on Mac (PPC) it should also work but I’m not there yet ;-)
    My hunch is that Sun is also looking into leveraging natively installed codecs, but this doesn’t solve the problem entirely because there isn’t one for FLV because it’s internal to Flash if I’m not mistaking.

  2. 2 Jay Huang said at 7:48 am on January 26th, 2008:

    Your first wish is also my wish for Java 2008 and I believe that it is also the wish of many other Java developers. Without a good support of multimedia, I don’t see how Java is going to compete in rich client . I’m working an application where I need to composite a video clip based on a set of images and sound clips. I can’t find any good solution in Java. To be able to create multimedia files is as important as being to play them. We have been waiting for this long for a good support of media from Java. Wish that we can see something this year

  3. 3 Johan Akesson said at 5:43 am on February 7th, 2008:

    Support for more codecs in Java, like H.264 and Flash, would be really nice! JMF is getting a bit old and the download size of JMF is a bit too big for Applet usage. The new features in “Java 6 Update N” in combination with some nice built in codecs would be a dream for the multimedia Applet market. In the mean time, you may want to check out the Java multimedia tool WireFusion (http://www.demicron.com), with support for real time 3D, Flash 2, Mpeg 1 video and mp3 for example.