1. Feb 15th, 2009

    How to fake momentum in three easy steps

    Jonathan Schwartz has some extraordinary news to share:

    As of late this evening, Sun will have shipped its 100,000,000th JavaFX runtime. Congratulations, folks! From a standing start in early December last year, JavaFX’s download rate makes it the fastest growing RIA platform on the market – demonstrating the fastest adoption of any product Sun has ever shipped.

    Impressive in so many ways. Just think about it, people have downloaded JavaFX 100,000,000 times, that’s a really big number, yet only reported one issue in the JavaFX installation forum. And it’s not even a significant issue. Or related to the most recent version. Or dignified with a response by Sun.

    Apparently JavaFX is working exceptionally well, although there is also the possibility that nobody can tell the difference. So let’s find out who are those people, actively downloading JavaFX?

    The most common way to distribute a JavaFX applet is to embed it in a web page and then view it in a browser. To deploy a JavaFX applet, use the following code in your HTML page:

    I guess actively was the wrong choice of words. It’s your browser cache grabbing a file from one of Sun’s server that counts as a download. It happens in the background when you visit a site with the right script tag. Do you get served banner ads? You too could be part of that exceptional momentum!

    Not to mention JavaFX is a cached resource, that means your browser will download it repeatedly, according to the expires headers, every five days. That’s very different from Flash, a plugin that your browser only downloads once for each new version of Flash. So if you’re thinking of comparing, just note that one is apples the other is orange seeds.

    And now for a little bit of creative accounting of my own. If every one of Sun’s 30,000+ employees visits, on a given day, 8 pages of internal Sun apps, themselves using JavaFX, a year gives you something in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 requests.

    So what about those three easy steps to fake momentum?

    1. Pick a number that, by virtue of the accounting practices (eg, resources vs plugins), is a few orders of magnitude larger then the competition.

    2. Blog that number.

    3. Ignore comments on your blog from people confused by the supposed implication.

     

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 4 Comments »

    1. Feb 16th, 2009

      Kas Thomas

      Thank you for pointing out the utter preposterousness of this kind of claim. Schwartz is (of course) not the only fake-momentum felon out there — these days most of them live at Adobe or Microsoft, I think — but he deserves to be called out on this.

      Good job.

    2. Feb 16th, 2009

      FJ!!

      I coded an interface with JavaFX for a project this weekend. All the defaults for look and positioning were atrocious. There was no anti-aliasing on the fonts… on MAC OS X! And that was just the beginning on how things didn’t position, didn’t stretch, didn’t align.

    3. Feb 16th, 2009

      GFarwell

      Cheating that blatantly leaves me – wtf!?

    4. Feb 17th, 2009

      Travis Collins

      You can find real world statistics about RIA plug-ins (flash, silverlight and java) at RIAStats.com. Use the RIAStats script (like google analytics) to get a customized report for your site.

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