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The long death of fat clients [Video]

Why JavaFX is a last gasp

Credit: Anna List / Shutterstock

With Adobe’s divestment of Flex and mobile Flash and Microsoft’s move from Silverlight to Metro, Oracle now seems all alone in believing that a fat client framework — in the form of JavaFX — is a worthwhile investment.

Fewer and fewer options exist for developing purely fat client desktop applications and fewer still for RAD applications with Web-based delivery (aka, “thick clients”). We are on the verge of a purely HTML/JavaScript client world.

Or we would be, if it weren’t for mobile pushing us back to client-side development. If you’d asked me a decade ago whether Objective-C would come back from the grave, I would’ve waited for the punch line to the joke. Meanwhile, Google decided to follow suit with its own slimmed fork of Java and an XML UI definition language.

Tools like PhoneGapdidn’t make quite the splash they might have because users came to expect that native look and feel. A new niche …

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