Sometimes a little project out of nowhere comes along and delivers something that instantly grabs you and makes you say "this is it!".
Such was my experience when on the Swing links of the week I found a mention of PulpCore, a small framework that is an alternative to the whole JavaFX fiasco and delivers what we've wanted all along: fun, fast, great looking applets in pure Java (not some new questionable language being forced down your throat)!
http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/
Try these ones in particular:
http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/particles/
http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/sketch/ (Flash, eat your heart out on this one) :-)
The API seems very concise (the code for each of the applets is very short), yet the end results is light years ahead of any of the awkward ugly demos of JavaFX I've seen.
Maybe there is hope for applets to complete with Flash head on after all.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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11 comments:
I saw the PulpCore demos for the first time last week, and I was also impressed. Very nice work, and what's more important to me, it shows how there's no end to cool kits coming out of nowhere when someone has an itch to scratch. I was pretty impressed by how smooth PulpCore had made the applet launching experience, and how good the animations are--the Milpa game is fun (ok, silly, but fun), and I like the compositing demo a lot.
I think Sun engineers give the impression that they just prefer to build everything themselves, at least, that's my impression regarding JavaFX. PulpCore is a great example of something to learn from, or, in the spirit of openness that Sun has been promoting the last few years, PulpCore is a cool project they can collaborate with.
I think we should all take a wait-and-see attitude regarding JavaFX Script. The cool demos IMO were the early ones Chris Oliver wrote when the language was still called F3. The ones that we've seen since then were based on a (relatively slow) interpreter, and with a runtime that hadn't been cleaned up yet. The preview version this summer used an early version of the compiled language and an incomplete runtime. What we'll see in the next month or so will be a compiled version of the language with a 1.0 compiler, rewritten runtime, UI and scenegraph library. There's been a lot of work even since the preview edition and I'm hoping it will be worth taking an interest in.
PulpCore is cool, so are JBox2d/Phys2d, Swash, Processing...I just wish that Sun would start opening up a little and start seeing the benefit of collaboration around these areas rather than trying to build everything from scratch.
Cheers
Patrick
The JBox2d demos are very impressive...wow!
Lookes nice for the draw 2d stuff, but javafx is a bit more then that. I especially like the binding stuff, which makes application development much easier.
Certainly has the "nice" factor...not sure if it'll replace JavaFX completely, but certainly interesting.
Based on the goal of the project, it won't try and do everything JavaFX is trying to do, at least from what I can tell.
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I've been developing in Flex 3 for the past 6 months and it's really an excellent framework. Having used data binding in Flex, I agree with the earlier comment, but take it further. If a UI framework doesn't have binding then I'm not even going to consider looking at it.
I've been exploring the latest JavaFX Netbeans tools and it's looking good. The binding support is good and I especially like the fact that they chose a non-XML format for the language. It's a more natural way to code than Adobe's MXML format.
If by "binding" you mean the ability to pull data out of a database and use it directly.. meh.. I don't know. I suppose I been in the MVC camp for too long.. but I don't find that using a client side UI to pull data directly from a database is as "scalable" as using a JEE server and some REST/EJB like calls, doing the bulk of the work on the back end. But.. that said.. I am not entirely sure what binding is these days. I remember back when Visual Basic and Delphi could work with databases.. you just supplied the DB info, and you could use a JTable or whatever and suddenly have direct DB data injected. I felt it tied the UI too much to the DB... in my opinion that's not very good design.
But.. where it would be good is if you were building a desktop app that used a local database on the desktop.. now that would make sense to me.
No, that's not what I'm referring to. I did a quick Google search for "actionscript binding" and here's the first result:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/quickstart/using_data_binding/
In JavaFX and Actionscript you have the ability to 'bind' one value to another. It's very useful when updating UI elements from a data model.
All demo applets crash Firefox 3 under Ubuntu (tested on 2 different machines). Seems that guys from PulpCore still need to work on portability if they want to compete against JavaFX...
I've made some additional research and the crashes seem to be the fault of Java 6 for Linux shipped by Sun. All PulpCore demos run flawlessly with default java-6-sun package installed from Ubuntu repositories. Duh.
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