Your recent comments are perfectly in-line with the goals of this site. This is how the thread should have started in the first place. There is absolutely nothing wrong with talking about a new technology, even one that isn't released yet; it just needs to relate to the work of the Church, even if it's 5-10 years away. The charge of this forum is not like any other community out there, and the Church has demanded that we continue to differentiate ourselves and remain focused on the goal.
GarysTurn asked that the thread be a little more focused on Church application of the Technology. Had the very next comment been exactly what you have now posted, there would have been no controversy and no hard feelings. Instead, the Moderator was challenged for doing his responsibility; that's disrespectful to someone who is giving volunteer hours per day to help the Church keep this site and forum clean and focused.
Alright, enough about that. I'd actually like to talk about the technology now, since you've got my interest peaked.
So yes, Flash can be expensive to develop if you're going to get a good IDE. They open-sourced Flex or ActionScript or something a few months back, right? I haven't heard of any good free IDE's yet. That would certainly be a cost disadvantage to the Church as you mentioned.Carl Jokl wrote:I Believe that JavaFX holds potential to be used in projects relating to the Church however at this point it has not been released yet. Even if it is only a week away until it is formerly released work on making use of the technology in the church cannot begin in earnest. One key thing about JavaFX vs Flash which could open the scope of people using it is that Flash Studio is expensive. Major design houses and development studio's have deep pockets to afford it but many in the open source community especially if they are doing volunteer development projects could find JavaFX attractive because there isn't a cost barrier in using it. Even in the case of Silverlight Microsoft offers express versions of Visual Studio these days acknowledging that paying large up front costs to be able to use a technology can lock certain people out of using it.
If we don't discuss JavaFX then people here may well not be aware of what it is and what potential benefits it could have. One thing which could be of interest is that it will have flash like cross platform support for playing video. This could make it easier to stream things like General Conference and broadcasts to users of many different operating systems. In fairness Flash has allowed this too but with JavaFX there should not be a cost to developing it. Also JavaFX editing will be supported by the free Netbeans IDE and a pluggin for Eclipse is being developed by Sun. Many in the Adobe flash/flex community are more likely to be using Eclipse as their IDE of choice.
Increacing awareness I think is important because no-one is going to be using a technology which they have never heard of or for which they just are not aware of the capabilities.
As for Silverlight, I do the Church has a few .NET projects they work on, so they may already have licenses that could make Silverlight worthwhile. I have to admit though, Silverlight may not be as cross-platform as the Church might like (at least not yet). You can develop Silverlight for free using the Express Editions of Visual Studio and you won't be missing much by not having the full versions of the product. However, Microsoft has a product line called Expression that is pretty expensive and almost necessary for real design of Silverlight site and controls. That would be where the real costs seep in.
So JavaFX sounds interesting, especially the comment that Java developers would be able to jump right in. Do you know if it will use new or existing Java languages?
With Silverlight, you have to learn the new WPF syntax for the presentation UI and then you can use C#, VB, or any other .NET language (including IronRuby or IronPython) to do the back-end code. With Flash, it seems like it uses new languages that developers have to learn as well. It seems like there is quite a learning and training curve for developers to learn Flash or Silverlight.
Will JavaFX have the same problem?