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Being a part of the Java community for a couple of years now and following whats going on across podcasts and blogs all over I stumbled into an observation today that got me wondering. I was listening to the Floss Weekly podcast episode 52 about Processing.

The discussion on this podcast and the ones I heard just before on the latest of This aint your dads Java about JavaFX sounded awfully similar.

Both technologies are aimed towards artists and designers and live on top of the Java platform. My feeling is that in an ideal world these two projects would be one and the same. However obviously thats not the case so here are a couple of things I would love to find out more about and came to my mind.

Feature by feature comparison

I have an overview kind of understanding but in detail I am pretty blank, but would be interested to find out more how these technologies compare. Both certainly gained ground for a while when it comes to public exposure, books and so on.

Do they know of each other?

I very much hope so and would think they do. But who knows?

Why did Sun not adopt Processing?

From what I can tell the license would have allowed it. But then maybe it would have been too hard to work with an existing community. Any ideas? And yeah.. I know about Chris and F3.

What’s the roadmap for JavaFX licensing? Will Processing and JavaFX be license compatible?

Processing is open source under a bunch different licenses (mostly LGPL), but for JavaFX there is not yet much information available. From what I found the plan is towards open source (and some parts are already GPL, CDDL ..) but nothing is certain yet. .

Could Processing gain by translating to JavaFX and then compiling rather than to Java?

What can they learn from each other?

Processing seems to be well adapted as a teaching tool, in the design community and in the hardware hacking community. JavaFX not so much yet, but how aobut JavaFX for the SunSpot devices? On the other hand JavaFX probably has better tool support by now and probably surpasses Processing in terms of performance as well. JavaFX as a new language is also richer than Processing.

Could Sun cooperate successfully with the processing community and enable JavaFX/Processing interoperability or at least adapt some of the successful approaches and engage the communities around them?

In the end it all comes down to the bytecode on the JVM but true interoperability is a bit more than that ;-)

So that was sitting on my mind and now I got it off. I promise to broadcast these questions to both communities one way or another and if I get any answers either post a comment or link. I look forward to be enlightened by you all.