Artemis Makes Java Practical on the Desktop

April 21, 2007 by Brook Molla.

Java is a tremendous language, and has a massive following for obvious reasons. I won’t go into them in this post, but anyone that has had the privilege of working with Java knows that it is a very powerful language, and I’m a huge fan myself. It’s among the most popular languages today, and the community of Java programmers has created a tremendous wealth of libraries and applications for everyone to build from. On the server, it is without doubt one of the strongest languages that a developer can use to build software.

But when it comes to GUI development in Java, it’s simply no good. Java developers suffered through AWT, then came Swing, and now many use SWT. Although each of these have been positive steps forward, Java desktop development is still not practical if the task is to produce an engaging user experience.

Relatively speaking, Adobe Flex is vastly superior to any of the GUI development options in Java. The reason is the structural design of the languages. Flex is an application platform that’s deployed in the Flash player, which was originally built as a design tool.

Adobe Apollo is a cross-platform runtime that allows Flex applications to be deployed in the desktop environment. Not only can Flex developers build RIAs for the web, but they can now deploy the same software to the desktop with little or no modification. Plus, GUI developers can use the full power of the Flex platform for creating desktop application as well.

Artemis is an open source project that provides a bridge to integrate Apollo with other languages. With Artemis, developers can build the GUI and deploy to the Apollo runtime, and handle any heavy lifting tasks with Java (and other languages in future releases). This means that developers can build their GUI for the Apollo runtime in Flex, their application’s heavy-lifting tasks in Java, and connect them together easily using Artemis.

So, when it comes to desktop applications, I think any serious developer should consider the Apollo platform with Flex integrated with Java by using Artemis. The combination will give you the ability to build cross platform desktop solutions that are engaging, beautiful and take far less time to develop than ever before.

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