I think it’s possible we may be talking at cross-purposes.

WebStart is a pretty good way of installing an application. In comparison with downloading an installer from a web-site; finding where the installed was saved; then running the installer etc… well, then WebStart has less friction.

BUT (it’s a big “but”, hences the caps )… there’s a *lot* more friction with WebStart than there is with an applet running in a web page. The point I was trying to make is this: any time you ask potential users to install something i.e. put a number of mouse clicks, and dialog box decisions, between the user seeing your system, and being able to try it out, you automatically lose a really significant percentage of your audience. In many case, that is “not a good thing” [TM] You mention ActiveX controls in your post. That’s not the competition. The competition is Flash.

Obviously, one problem with the above is that, right now, it’s not possible to do JavaFX applets on MacOS X, because Apple hasn’t shipped a suitable Java SE 6 plug-in. Hopefully, that will be addressed by Apple in the not-too-distant future (although, they do seem to have their hands kinda full right now!).

Also, when I said WebStart looked “ugly”, perhaps I should have said, “non-configurable” (beauty is clearly in the eye of the beholder). The thing is, when a developer creates a stand-alone installer for an application they want to distribute, they can create a look for the installer that matches the look of their application. It would probably help developers, if they could do things like set colours for features in the WebStart installing windows, and add custom graphics etc. These things would start to make WebStart compete with stand-alone installers in terms of letting developers of a piece of software have control over the *complete* experience the end-user gets, right from the point a user expresses interest in using their software.

WebStart is annoying only when it is not signed with authorized certificate and your application does have to be able to access your computer (like files, system properties, etc…) which seems very reasonable.

I do feel very comfortable that any WebStart application either is not capable of accessing my computer or can do that, but is siged using “well-known” cert.publisher. Yellow triangles, questions etc. - only when not signed and capable of doing whatever it wants with my computer, for me it’s fine.

The other way was shown to us by Micro$oft and ActiveX on web pages. No questions, very “user-friendly” and it was enough to open some page in IE and… viruses, trojans and everything else was doing with your computer the Autumn of Middle Ages…

In other words, will all PC users who grab or update to a future new “Java 2 Platform Standard Edition” runtime automatically get JavaFX included??

For sure, the export plug-ins for Photoshop will be important. I’m not sure they’re more important than the designer tool. Why? Because JavaFX has an absolutely critical requirement to enable Drag n Drop building of user interfaces; as can be done currenly for Swing using Netbeans. Without that designer tool, JavaFX will, in many cases, be more of a pain to use than Swing.

@Asgard and Jeria

Jeria is right. Native OS theme works really well with Swing, especially with Java 6.

By the way - anyone who thinks non-native Swing has to be ugly doesn’t understand Swing. It’s just about the most powerful GUI toolkit around - you can build *anything* using Swing. So , it’s powerful, but the problems is it’s hard to use, especially for doing graphically funky interfaces, such as those built using Flash/Flex.

That’s why the JavaFX project was started - to make it *much* easier for people to take advantage of the huge capabilities of the Swing/Java2D platform.

I personally think that Swing widgets look quite good when they use the native operating system theme.

I like the way how the PulpCore [http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/] engine handles this, except the tray icon of course.

I hope the JFX Designer will be accepted by designers and artists, but I think that some export filter for established programs like Photoshop are even more important.