Bear,
Thanks for your candid questions! I personally have not seen to much of that, but perhaps it is because I'm speaking about JavaFX and they're snickering behind my back :-)
The reason that I've been so proactive in helping to move JavaFX forward is that it sorely needed in the software development industry. I've articulated my feelings on this subject in the following post on my "Helping you become a JavaFXpert" weblog:
Putting My CTO Hat On - Our Company's Plans for Using JavaFX Script Also, you can see the video of a presentation that I did at JavaPolis that addresses your questions as well:
Video from the JavaPolis "Intro to JavaFX" Presentation The core of the issue for me is this:
Cross platform client-server application development has always been a bear (no offense, "Bear") to pull off. I saw a ray of sunlight circa 1996 when it appeared that the JVM was going to be nearly ubiquitous. Then came the browser wars, which deferred that hope, and caused us to use the Web browser as an application platform, rather than for what it was design for, namely sharing rich media content. Since then, technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and XML have been forced to fill the gap that could have been easily filled by a rich-client technology. Consequently, we have internet applications that are hard to write and maintain.
I'm seeing sunlight again because of two factors:
1) I believe that the JVM will be nearly ubiquitous by the end of 2008. This is because of initiatives such as
Sun's Java SE 6 update 10 project.
2) JavaFX Script runs on the JVM, can instantiate and call methods of any Java class, and has a simple declarative syntax that provides a great abstraction to Swing and Java 2D.