Sun.com has asked me a number of questions and published my answers over here. Due to space limitations a couple of my answers didn ‘t make it to that post. Here are the bonus tracks:

JSC: Can you identify any important differences between American and Russian developers?

Fain: I can just give you my opinion based on my personal experience. American developers are more motivated. They are success oriented and have mortgages and car loans to pay. They value their jobs and work hard to keep the paycheck coming. Lack of motivation is one of the major issues in Russia.

Another major difference is that American software developers accept the fact that their project managers are ultimately responsible for success of the project. The manager “s word to not use some technology is usually well taken. Some of the Russian developers strongly believe they know better how to develop the application, can get carried away trying “to do better for the project rdquo;. This can lead to failed deadlines. If you have such a bad egg in your project team, the chances are slim that you “ll be able to change his attitude.

Having said that, I also admit that there are excellent software engineers in the former Soviet Union and we are gladly work with them in our company.

JSC: You have begun experimenting with JavaFX,and even re-used the existing back end of the Java Pet store, and performed a little facelift by replacing the UI developed with AJAX/JSP/JavaServer Faces with one using JavaFX 1.0. Tell us about your impression of JavaFX.

Fain:

I ‘ve been following the process of creation of JavaFX during the last couple of years. Sun always had great software engineers and the JavaFX team was not an exception. But I had a feeling that this group didn ‘t have enough support from Sun ‘s top management.

About a year ago I tried to create the Pet Store with JavaFX 1.0. Back than it was not an easy job. There were no decent library of UI components, even such simple thing as a hyperlink control was not there. You ‘d need to manually create a wrappers for Swing components. Deploying with applets was not working for me. I had to use Web Start with scary security messages. Since you asked this question, I decided to revisit the page javafx.com. It laquo;greeted raquo; me with a warning that laquo;an applet dl.javafx.com is requesting unrestricted access to your computer. raquo; I pressed the button laquo;Deny raquo;. To make the story short, I put JavaFX aside till better times.