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How about Azuereus?

Bruce is such a Flash fanboy these days. I've lost a lot of respect for him. And while I agree with some of what he says about desktop java, especially Java FX being a PITA (he was thinking it, you know he was), the article quickly turned into a beg for Sun to support Flash.

And there are a lot of Swing based applications that look and perform wonderful. That doesn't mean Swing is good in terms of development, it just means it is possible for some really smart people to do something great with a mediocre API.

Sun's three greatest failures:

* [OT] The J2EE lie and it's completely failed portability and compatibility (see other DZone article on why 37% of companies are still using JDK 1.4)

* Failure to make Java Open Source or at least license compatible with GPL such that it could be deployed with EVERY Linux distro since 1995... imagine where Java would be today if that were the case for the last 13 years (instead, C, Python, PHP and now Ruby dominate that platform).

* And yes, Swing. Such a huge opportunity lost due to a crappy, ignored implementation. If you want to know how bad Swing truly is, try it on Linux -- which should have been their #1 target market for Swing, only because they never had a chance against VB (1995 - 2001) and .NET (2002 - Present). Isn't anyone else STUNNED that people develop rich client applications on Linux with Python? And they're not bad!

No, nobody cares about Java on desktop. They stopped caring in 1995 when all of these mistakes were first made, followed by 13 years of being completely ignored.

So true it hurts

PS: Yes Eckel is a Flash fanboy, must be on Adobe payroll... almost without a doubt. And yes Flash sucks for anything other than the odd interactive graph or video player. Applications written in Flash suck from a user perspective, let alone a developer perspective.

i quite like swing

Unfortunately I think Bruce is very right. And after all, we don't *have* to use Java for everything. We can make great UIs with other technologies.
,

I'm wondering how Bruce hasn't come up with a "Thinking in Flash while in Flex" book yet... strange isn't it, after all his talk spent on Adobe products, I agree with cbegin, Bruce must be on Adobe payroll

Some of use are really really lazy in always having to learn YET-ANOTHER-UI-LANGUAGE. Flex is worth the switch from Swing but is there any toolkit or framework out there that will probably allow us to develop for flex from java using Swing familiar APIs.

Deceptive title.

Flash fanboys need to confront a particular reality... Flex has been around for years, but we're seeing that Flex has run up against a complexity barrier. You can certainly find things as complex as Pandora done in Flash (most of the complexity is in an AI back-end... The actual UI is simple and streamlined.) Imeem, on the other hand, has a much more complex interface that's only partially implemented in Flash, which means that it sucks.

When I see real working Flash apps that are more than slightly enhanced media players, I might become a believer.