Adobe Flex3 – First Impression

Continuing with my research on RIAs, I looked at Adobe Flex next.  I already had Flash Player 9 installed.

I went to http://flex.org/showcase/ and explored several Flex apps.  All the apps ran fine.  The experience was much better than JavaFX.

One notable app is the Flickr Gallery (http://gallery.worldsware.com/).

From the showcase description:

“Flickr Gallery is an experimental virtual environment I built using Papervision3D. It shows Flickr’s “most interesting” photos of the day in an art gallery format you can walk around it. Zoom in for closer detail and pop up a photograph’s Flickr page or view a map for geo-tagged images.”

The Papervision3D website (http://www.papervision3d.org/)  is very cool.

JavaFX – First Impression

Curious about JavaFX, I went to http://www.javafx.com/ and clicked this link to watch the Sun video.  I saw the Java animation logo which indicated it was loading the video.  I waited and nothing happened.  I opened the Java Console and found this error message:

BadFieldException[ Cache must be enabled for nativelib or installer-desc support,http://dl.javafx.com/Decora-SSE-natives-windows-i586__V1.0.0.jar]

I guessed there was some configuration problem, so I opened the Java Control Panel.  In the “Temporary Internet Files” Settings, I selected the checkbox “Keep temporary files on my computer” and adjusted the location and the disk space.  After I did that, I went back to the page where it was loading the video.  And it worked.  But there are two Java icons in the Notification area.

Would a typical internet user know to open the Java Console to see why the video is not loading?  Would a typical internet user know to open the Java Control Panel and select the checkbox “Keep temporary files on my computer” when he or she sees the “BadFieldException” error meessage?

I think Sun needs to make it easier for a typical internet user to run JavaFX.