The “Break it Down” Blog

I know the Consumer JRE has been talked to death , but I’ve been sitting and listening to the interview by ITConversations with Chet Haase and Ben (Galbraith, I didn’t see his last name given but I’m assuming who that was) and thought it was an excellent interview.

Besides all the features coming in the JRE, the interview covers some questions that I had like “Why should I care about JavaFX?” and “What’s with the revitalized interest by Sun with Java on the desktop?” and of course some talk about cross platform LNF and Metal-bashing.

I think what I liked the most about the interview is it seemed to be completely devoid of B.S.

For example, the interviewers pushed the issue of this new-found interest in the desktop by Sun, but these are all features we’ve been *asking* for since Java 1.2/1.3 and *screaming* for since Java 1.4. Chet’s answer was totally honest and I think for the folks here that work in companies where they have some say over how money gets spent would understand: The desktop was never a place Sun made money from. It’s hard to pitch ideas to managers to get money to sink into efforts and technologies that makes the company no money and becomes a monkey on it’s back.

Luckily it sounds like the push in the client market by *other* vendors is what moved Sun into action. Sun started to see other company’s technologies move into the enterprise space and seeing the potential of toe-stepping that was going to happen in the next 5 years has sent the right signals for Sun to decide the desktop is important again.

A while later the talk moved onto LNFs. Is cross platform LNFs important? What about platform fidelity? Nimbus? Metal was awesome in 1922?

Ben has some really strong views on LNF and I tend to agree with coming from a *client development* perspective… more specifically that if Sun had provided a beautiful LNF this entire time (e.g. think of Sun had bundled Alloy with Java 1.4?) developers would have just used that and this push for platform-specific LNF would have never gotten to the extreme that it did. And that push for platform LNF fidelity was born out of the realization that Sun was never *going* to provide a LNF that wasn’t horrible looking.

As I mentioned, I tend to agree with that assessment, but then I believe Chet (or one of the interviewers… sorry don’t recall) pointed out that in the non-consumer-desktop space, platform fidelity, like in the enterprise has this imperative need to keep all apps looking identical to one another otherwise the people using them will balk at the software and not know what to do with it.

I sat on that one for a while… do I agree with that assessment? Ultimately I decided no (but it was a “on the fence” decision).

In this day and age, with Vista, Mac, Office 2007 (the Ribbon), Eudora, Windows Media Player, pre-installed vendor utilities, most spyware and virus scanning software and just about 3/4 of the applications on my computer right now… none of them look like a Windows application. They all bring their own layout with them, their own styling, their own color schemes, interaction mechanisms, menuing styles, etc.

If you work in this century and have been using a computer for the last 5 years, I don’t think the argument *for* a platform-specific LNF applies anymore. Too many things don’t look like it, and people get by just fine. Ultimately the importance is that the app does what you expect it to do, and having it look nice is an added plus.

But those are just my thoughts… give the podcast a listen and pipe-up… what are your thoughts on this new desktop strategy? JavaFX? Look and Feels? 2008 Elections? (doh)