I thought Flash Bashing, these days, was done only by the Internet’s semi-literates! Coming from a respectable person like James Gosling, the creator of Java is rather uncalled for. Nonetheless, it is understandable since his work somewhat relates him to JavaFX (supposedly, a competitor to the client side apps of the Flash Platform). He has all the right to be on the defensive (rather abusive) perspective towards their extremely successful competitor - Flash.

Redmond Developer News published an interview with Sun Microsystems’ James Gosling, in which they discussed JavaFX and its competition in the RIA space. Gosling shared some pointed thoughts on how he believes JavaFX compares to the Flash / Flex platform.James said, “If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff — richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs — it really falls short.”

Well, I’m more amused particularly with John Dowdell’s response to this particular statement (JD’s response indeed made me chuckle). JD responded in a short blog post and right to the point at James Gosling’s statement;

If there’s a particular network protocol you need, then please let the Player team know. If you think you can do something better, then please ship it. A followup question, “How will JavaFX be positioned with regard to Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR?”, fails to distinguish between in-the-browser and beyond-the-browser runtimes.

Well, we’ve heard Gosling say this before and I learnt that this was also the common hype at JavaOne last year when JavaFX launched. And any moderate to advanced Flash developers will know that most of these are based on the common misconceptions developers have about what the Flash Player can do.

Kevin Hoyt added that while Java and Flash have been around roughly the same amount of time, Flash has only recently provided a networking API. By contrast, Java was created with networking in mind. While there are countless libraries for various networking protocols in Java, there’s really almost nothing in Flash. Even the common protocols such as IRC, NNTP, SMTP/POP, etc. There really needs to be a way in Flash to protect your intellectual property should you decide to commit the time to build and monetize on these opportunities. This would also afford developers the ability to monetize with component libraries, image processing libraries, etc.

On another note, with regards to the UI development, most veteran Java developers admit that building user interfaces in Java is too difficult. And with the current look of JavaFX, things aren’t that optimistic when it comes to simplification of Java UI development. Over the years, Sun has introduced a number of frameworks, api’s that promised to improve UI development, but have never made much headway in simplifying things.