From JAXXWiki

The challenge of objectivity

This is a tricky page for me to work on. On the one hand, I do genuinely want to offer a fair portrayal of the various options available, but on the other hand I have an obvious and inescapable bias towards JAXX. After all, if I didn't think JAXX had a significant edge over the competition, I wouldn't have bothered to write it in the first place. Now that I have done so I also have pride-of-authorship to contend with.

Given that there is no way for me to be properly objective (or at least no way to be perceived as properly objective) on this page, I have decided to remove myself from the proceedings altogether. I will start this page out with "in their own words" descriptions of the tools and perhaps link to a few reviews that seem fair, which limits any possible objectivity problems. I would like to see readers balance this page out with fair, constructive commentary of the pros and cons of the various tools, both compared to JAXX and against each other.

If a tool is better suited for a particular task than JAXX is, I would like to see that stated explicitly. Please praise these tools where they deserve praise, and point out areas where JAXX needs improvement. You won't hurt my feelings. With that said, negative commentary about the other tools might well hurt their authors' feelings -- I don't know any of the authors to say one way or another. Please be sure that any criticism directed against any of these tools is fair and, above all, stated in a mature and constructive fashion.

Ethan 14:30, 2 February 2006 (EST)

Which toolkits to include?

I confess that I'm not familiar with any of these toolkits beyond having looked at their web sites. Consequently I have no idea which of them are in wide enough usage to warrant being discussed here. As there are a lot of toolkits (and I imagine that isn't a complete list), I had to pick-and-choose which ones to include here to avoid making this page too long.

As I haven't even heard of most of the ones I didn't list, I'm guessing most of them don't have very large userbases. If I'm mistaken and any of the ones I missed are in fact major contenders, please add them. Likewise, if it turns out one of the ones I listed is in fact a bit player not in widespread use, it might be appropriate to remove it. Or not -- if this page gets too long we can just break it up into multiple pages.

In fact, it might be wise to go ahead and break this page up; that way there's room to include code samples, or even complete working JNLP-launchable demos, in order to show the other tools off. I'd really like to see this page become a valuable resource, because there are a lot of toolkits out there and it's not necessarily obvious which of them are world-class packages and which are crap thrown together by a college student in his spare time.

(I now feel compelled to mention that I am, in fact, a college dropout, and I put JAXX together in my spare time. So, make of that what you will.)

Ethan 16:13, 2 February 2006 (EST)