JavaFX DOA RIA
Even though I officially run with a different crew in the Java'hood, so to speak, I honestly wanted to be amazed by the JavaFX preview release. I wanted it to be some substance to back up all the chest-thumping grandstanding since last year's JavaOne. It wasn't.
The demo left me horribly underwhelmed. Numbering in the dozens, social media apps are an easy way of showing the wow factor of your platform while remaining accessible by normal users. IMHO, social media is a big reason (among others) of why Adobe AIR has caught on. The power play to Tonya Harding AIR would have been an app like Twirl, Twitterific, or Alert Thingy. Like I've said before, where is that killer JFX app? As competitors in the 2008 Script Bowl at JavaOne, Groovy, Scala, and JRuby have Twitter clients. Those languages which were deemed unworthy of JavaFX's awesomeness have gone further in the RIA space than JavaFX itself. JavaFX has spawned many façade apps, ie pretty but non-functional and just for show. A buggy but functional demo is worth a million times more than the prettiest façade.
With moves like this JFX is DOA before it's RIA.