This post isn't about LWUIT, its about Java on the desktop and its current direction. Microsoft just introduced Windows 8, for those of you who haven't been following here is the gist:
Run's on Arm (as well as Intel obviously), Completely new touch/gesture based UI, less emphasis on Windows.
Apple also introduced Tiger (next Mac OS X), which also focuses more on full screen applications as well as eliminates the scrollbar... Mac OS X will now scroll like the iPhone and hide the scrollbar when it isn't used.
Rumors are also abundant about Apple's laptop line moving to Arm chips which they can easily do since they have a fat binary .app directory structure (which MS doesn't have).
To me these things signal a massive UI convergence trend where the mobile UI takes the lead. Up until now mobile UI's were influenced by desktop paradigms and now we finally see the reverse coming on in full force.
Where does this leave Java developers?
Swing hasn't been moving forward for quite a while now & Java FX isn't even in production and already it seems behind the curve on these sort of features. I'd love to say that LWUIT can take over but right now we still don't have many of the features necessary to write full scale desktop apps...
However, I would say that this is a great time to be a mobile developer since an upheaval is on its way and it seems that we are leading the pack.
This sort of convergence also means a huge migration to the cloud, when using multiple mobile devices its just impossible to sync them in any other way. Even those reluctant about privacy and security would probably shift to the cloud to remain competitive.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
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