I read an article that I found on James Weaver’s JavaFX Blog, it’s an interview with James Gosling. If you scroll towards the middle of the article, you will see this question:

“As organizations think about building rich Internet applications or rich client applications, when should developers look at JavaFX over competing technologies?”

I think that’s a question we are going to see more and more this year (JavaFX vs. Flex vs. Silverlight). Now, can you build Rich Internet Applications with Java today? Yes. Java today has excellent tools for building Rich Internet Applications with Swing or Applets. However, it’s very challenging to use these tools to build such applications. Additionally, the size and installation of JRE doesn’t make it any easier. Basically JavaFX will make it much simpler to build Rich Internet Applications with Java. That makes sense.