Sun Engineer Amy Fowler has been working on Java UIs since there were such things, so she’s probably knows a thing or two about them. And she’s enthusiastic about JavaFX. Admittedly, she’s paid to be at some level, but she makes a fairly compelling case in this interview. She admits that there are good reasons why developers may have started out as suspicious, some having to do with how Sun pushed it at JavaOne — “Though it’s great fun to render multiple video feeds into hundreds of translated, animating graphics nodes, most business app developers are worried about much more basic problems, like managing views into large data sets and validating forms data.” But the most interesting thing I got from her interview is the idea that, just as there is now a professional class of Web designers who take the back-end code created by programmers and make a pretty face for it, so too will there be a new breed of UI engineers for Java (and other) standalone apps in the future: “So how do you get a beautiful application? You have it designed by people who understand visual design and usability. Period. Karsten Lentzsch once made a great point that ‘finding the design’ is really the hardest part of building a GUI. And up to this point, the Java platform has been aimed at developers, most of whom couldn’t ‘find’ a design if it landed on their MacBook Pro. So we have to provide a paradigm in Java which enables designers and developers to work more seamlessly in constructing beautiful applications. We believe that JavaFX script, in conjunction with existing designer tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc) and development tools tailored for building GUIs, is how we’ll get there.” I have to admit that this idea intrigues me, and I think there are implications beyond just JavaFX or even just Java. Of course, most Web sites aren’t necessarily put together by professional Web designers — but the high-traffic, high-money ones are. Will the same be true of standalone apps in five years? Software Development