JavaOne 2008 : Feature-On-Demand Applications, Rich Internet Applications
posted Thursday, 8 May 2008
 | Feature-On-Demand Applications. Last night I attended two interesting BOFs. The first was an experimental NetBeans 'Feature-on- demand' session. This was very interesting. Geertjan Wielenga and Jiri Rechtacek went into some details on a new model for getting features into not only the | NetBeans IDE but also platform applications. Basically by having a stub in place that allows you to see the feature (or plural all the features available) you can select it and at runtime it is downloaded. They went through a number of quick demos that showed features auto-magically being available (and downloaded and installed) as needed. This allows for quick initial startup times and initially very light apps that over time become larger as certain features are used. Some issues were brought related to - how to behave if the network goes down. Overall very, very interesting and a way of reducing the size of the IDE to the features you use and no more. Makes it light and generally faster. You can find more information here. The other talk was by Stepphan Jannsen from the Belgian Java Users Group who compared versions of DHTML, GWT, Flex/AIR and JavaFX. He talked about building an app for delivering videos and presentations. You can see it here. He had a number of different implementations - his favorite so fair is Flex/Air but he said that JavaFX was moving fast and the results for both looked excellent. One take-away, the competition between all of these - is making them all better. |
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