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I look at it as hope for the desktop, period. And for the web. Both the desktop and the web have had their share of ills this year. So maybe that means the chemistry of software running on them is wrong!

Maybe Java/JavaFX can help sort that out. :-)

Here is an example. I was rather surprised to see Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer 5.0-8beta, Safari 3, and Firefox - all 5 - receive crucial updates the same day this week. Anybody else notice that or is it destined to slip by without comment or discussion?

Sloppy SQL application programming, ill-considered Javascript interpreter features, whacky-yet-omnipresent obsolete ActiveX controls are all taking their toll. Alone, they are bad but combined they are something worse than a headache.

Maybe too much software is being passed around by from hand-to-hand - or silently sucked off the web, passed from browser to server and server to browser like a bad cold going around.

With JavaFX/Java/JNLP, users are not going to have to spend as much time in their web browsers. Lets face it, browsing time is risk time. What if you get told one week to turn off Javascript, Flash, and Shockwave in your web browser on week by management - but now your employee portal on the intranet web server does not work? Plus, lets your bank site at home does not work either because it requires a certain browser brand and that browser must have Javascript enabled for the site to work.

At that point, being able to launch your client apps from your desktop without starting your browser or using any components of your browser starts to look pretty tempting - if you can do it. So, JavaFX is going to be a white knight for a lot of folks some days each year, for that reason alone. Not to mention many others.

Web apps can be pretty slow at times too. Waiting for a web page to render is bad. And if the page uses lots of Ajax/JSON, it seems a little more apt to never finish rendering - or come up completely blank - than traditional web pages. Busy networks and busy servers just aggravate the problem.

Desktop client apps are normally programmed more stably than their Ajax/JSON brethren.

Sun has taken steps similar to Apple's Mac OS X to make sure that JavaFX apps render their graphics very fast. Since the entire UI is graphics these days, that is an important step in sparing users annoying waits.

There are also more things that can be done on the screen when graphics are running fast/smoothly. Not just fancy color images but animation has become more commonplace for apps in the past year or two.

Even if your are not watching a movie, it is not unusual for your application to use animation while you flick through collections of photos, watch dynamically updated status displays, and so forth.

The fact that you can switch a JavaFX web page applet to a desktop application with a flick of the wrist these days is pretty neat. Not having to worry about browser lockups/latencies while you are typing data in a form can be pretty nice.

Having a JavaFX applet/desktop client might become an extra "nice" touch that the leading portal and shopping/banking sites will do in the future. After all, they're not married to the web - they're married to you, the customer.