Oracle Java and Adobe

Question

I'm a newbie here, so please take this with a grain of salt. I have watched with great interest as Sun acquired MySQL and then as Oracle acquired Sun. While doing so, I have been researching various rich internet application frameworks for work and a side business. I have been very impressed with Adobe's RIA offerings and with Microsoft's latest rollout of Silverlight. Although I haven't been as impressed with the JavaFX framework, clearly there are some advantages to building RIA's with Java. I am at a cross-roads in terms of a decision as to where to invest most of my learning efforts. Should I dive into Adobe Flex (Flash), Microsoft Expression (which I can obtain free, as a student), or JavaFX? OK, so here is where I possibly expose the extent of my naiveté. I find myself having a kind of pipedream -- namely, that Oracle would make one additional major acquisition -- Adobe Systems Incorporated. In my pipedream, I imagine that the Adobe division of Oracle makes a business decision to transition ActionScript to Java (of course, with no issues concerning software licensing), to incorporate any useful concepts from JavaFX into the next release of their RIA-related software, and to become the UI framework for Oracle applications. Of course, in my pipedream, Oracle-Adobe also make some seemingly bad business decisions, such as making the standard version of Adobe Acrobat free (to save trees in the world); however, even in spite of such humanitarian sacrifices of the bottom-line, in my hypothetical world at least, I feel quite confident (even excited) about my intellectual investment in the new company. Is this pipedream really as ridiculous as it seems? Any advice in the context of reality?

Answer 1

Billy  Verreynne  wrote:
BluShadow wrote:
One of our developers here is using Ajax with APEX. Not quite sure how he's done it as he's the APEX expert here, not me. I know he looked into it when there was a need for nested drop down lists within the application he was developing.Simple AJAX calls are not difficult to support - the problem using a proper AJAX framework where the callbacks (AJAX calls to your PL/SQL code) does not support the quirky APEX URL format. Also, many calls will have variable number of parameters. This means having to use the flexible 2 parameter call architecture - and as soon as you do this, the call can no longer be handled by the runtime system of APEX that receives and processes URLs.
In order to have your AJAX callbacks run inside the APEX run-time system, you need to define "+on demand+" APEX process wrappers for them.. and this is one the major problems I have with trying to integrate proper AJAX frameworks with APEX. Either the framework needs to be modded or APEX... And these frameworks work as is with Java, PHP, Python, etc. - which begs the question why muck with the framework when it works for most languages? The shortcoming IMO is definitely with APEX.That seems fairy nuff. ;)