Being creative again

Amongst the things that really amazed me this afternoon in Gent was Lovely Charts, an online charting application that’s currently under semi-private beta. My first impression was something like “if it’s just a Flex alternative to Gliffy, I don’t see the point”. By the way, Gliffy is developed with what was the most advanced RIA technology before Flex 2 came in, namely OpenLaszlo.

Then Jérôme Cordiez proceeded with a small demo which showed something very interesting and reminded of Javapolis 2007. There was a lot of animosity there between JavaFX and Flex advocates, the most prominent JavaFX advocate being certainly James Gosling himself. And it was funny because the only answer Sun seemed to have against Flex was like “everything you can do with Flex, you can do it with Java, and even more”. But of course the problem is not what is possible, but what is easy to achieve. And Flex is far far ahead of Java on that topic. And even though Sun perfectly understood that and probably launched the JavaFX initiative to solve that very issue, I think they’re still too late.

But why is it so important to be able to achieve advanced rich features as easily as possible? Well, that’s precisely what Jérôme demonstrated today: because you lose less time on putting things together, you have much more time to be creative. And as a matter of fact, Lovely Charts is not just a Flex Gliffy counterpart, as it proposes a whole new way to create charts with a very interesting “create and connect” tool. This allows you to basically create your chart very fluently without having to change your tool continuously. That’s the kind of feature you wonder why it was not included sooner in other charting tools, including Visio, Omnigraffle and others.

Hopefully I’ll get my beta login soon so that I can test it further.