> What happens to JavaFX? Larry Ellison rarely, if ever, commented on any specific product of the companies that he acquired. JavaFX is probably the only exception. The words he used were that he encouraged OpenOffice.org developers to "write OpenOffice.org libraries in JavaFX".
Many commentators (including at least a couple of bloggers from the old Sun) interpreted his words as that the good ol' Larry wanting to rewrite OOo in JavaFX and immediately laughed at that thought. As a card carrying member of Chairman Larry's fan club, I really think his words meant something more focused and much simpler. Microsoft generated $20 billion in profit in 2008 from selling and servicing Microsoft Office. This a very significant numbe--considering Microsoft "only" made $22 billion profit for the whole year. In comparison, the old Sun probably took home no more than $20 dollars from OpenOffice (which includes StarOffice). Again, this comparison is very significant, considering that OpenOffice is the ONLY alternative to Microsoft Office. Strictly based on technical considerations, the main reason that OOo is not (or cannot be) used by corporations, from my own experience, is that the macro language in OOo (StarBasic) is no where near that of VirtualBasic. As heavy office suite users, we NEVER generate any document from scratch, but always start with a template or running a macro. The capabilities of OOo are, at least AFAIC, not much different from those of Microsoft Office. But the inferiority of StarBasic compared to VB is what stopped OOo from being considered by corporations (and from generating any profit). Thus, if the OOo developers could make JavaFX an easy-to-program macro language for OOo, allowing OOo to easily invoke the power of Java, the table, vis-a-vis Microsoft Office, could begin to turn (& the pony hair might still be able to keep his job). I believe this is what Ellison meant, but I seem to be the only crazy idiot with this thought. Chairman Larry also mentioned netbooks (I knew the netbooks are doing very well, but never in my wildest contemplation that its sales could reach $ 11.6B in only its second full year). Ellison never mentioned any specific OS, except only stated that Android may not be the right OS for netbooks. Well, if (and a very big IF) OpenSolaris can be made to be (much) lighter and boot (much) faster (e.g., making OpenSolaris primarily as a front end to run IPS and JavaFX, and run OOo cloud), this thought may not be as stupid as it seems. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
