Chris Oliver (blog) is the guy who patched Mozilla Rhino to implement continuations and implemented the Javascript-based flowscript engine of Apache Cocoon.

When Sun acquired the company he was working for (SeeBeyond) he moved on and started to work on a side project to write another scripting language for building UI applications for Java. He then called it F3 (form follows function) and I was honored to receive some of the first examples of it (when it was still called GBTDS for ‘GUI builder that doesn’t suck’) and to talk to him and my good friend Ricardo Rocha (of Cocoon XSP fame) in person (both live in LA too) to discuss some of his early design choices.

It was a time when DHTML was more and more appealing to me and I was moving away from swing and traditional GUI building approaches so using F3 was not (and still isn’t) appealing to me but not because of itself but because of what it requires to run (a very heavyweight JVM). That said, F3 is a very pleasant hybrid scripting language and has been heavily influenced by DHTML and SVG but also managed to introduce very interesting ideas (such as variable bindings).

Recently, F3 graduated and has been renamed JavaFX.

It’s really too bad that silly marketing names can make something elegant and thought out feel like an half-baked late-moment hack. And it’s also too bad that it seems that everybody and their moms are now pushing for their own platforms+scripting combinations (Flash/Flex, .NET/Silverlight, Java/JavaFX), which makes them look like “me too”-ish and makes people miss the real innovations that are actually happening in there.

But as much as I appreciate that the RIA idea is pushing for innovation in the software development environments and stacks, I also can’t avoid resonating with those who point out that these are yet another golden licensing cage and that the web is much more than that.

In any case, kudos to Chris for another outstanding achievement.