Building Rich Internet Applications using Flex and Java (Creative Knowledge Bank Book 1)

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The common profile is for all the APIs that are available on every device and includes the scene graph API and media components, whilst the desktop profile represents the more familiar Swing components.

The third is the mobile profile which is expected to be released during and is expected to be a complete application stack for mobile handset developers but the publically available details remain sketchy. This release version should feel a little more complete and consistent. The decision to develop a new language rather than following Adobe's lead here is a bold one and I think a good one. JavaFX Script is generally very pleasant to work with and has a number of possible uses beyond its current application - for example the JavaFX data format FXD , a key part of project Nile, uses a subset of the JavaFX Script declarative format to represent graphic resources.

With Silverlight, Microsoft delivered its own toolset the Expression suite to directly take on Adobe's Creative Suite offerings. Sun is also working on its own tool expected next year but has chosen via Project Nile to first focus on supporting the popular existing tools starting with Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop.

A designer working with one of the Adobe tools creates their graphic resource in the usual way and can then export the file to FXD. The viewer utility allows users to view the graphics file to confirm that the exported file looks as expected. From within the JavaFX scripting language developers are able to access and manipulate the individual layers that make up a single graphic resource file. This works well for graphic resources but still leaves the problem of applying custom styling to the basic components.

Underpinning all of this work is Java 6 Update 10 formally the consumer JRE project — improvements to deployment, performance, memory usage and the built in look and feel Nimbus all help the effectiveness of Swing as a desktop development platform. Unfortunately this is quite a limiting factor for developers at the moment. Whilst Sun has shipped versions of update 10 for Linux and Solaris as well as Windows there are crucial implementation differences between the versions with the applet quickstarter, kernel installer, and direct3D pipleine all restricted to the Windows platform only.

He also gave us up-to-date download figures:. That both Flash and Silverlight are entirely closed source proprietary tools remains a significant barrier to adoption in some developer shops. Moreover given that so much of the key code in Flash, such as its audio and video codecs, is licensed from third party sources it would be very difficult for Adobe to open up the platform in the way Sun did with Java.

Although the licenses are not yet finalised Sun has committed to making JavaFX available as open source software, and has so far released the compiler and scene graph APIs under the GPL v. This may well boost its adoption when the platform is released but it still has significant work to do to become a strong contender.

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Thank you for participating in the discussion. JavaFX is taking to much time. Microsoft already have a 2. So when it will be released? I think JFX 1. Technically autumn finishes on December 21st.

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The two big possible wins for JFX, I think, will be that it is open sourced as highlighted in the article , and if it managed to have as much impact in the mobile space as JME has had. I tried JavaFX about 6 months ago - hopefully things have improved since then, as I found it led to very large, unreadable scripts e. I am quite excited by JavaFX as a Java developer, I'd rather use it than Flex, which I've been using for the last year and find simultaneously powerful and limiting ; I hope I'm not disappointed.

Also, if you can use Java for the client and the server, then you can even by-pass web services and use RMI not popular now, but I guess it's the closest alternative to BlazeDS. I agree that the RIA space feels open. But Sun need to get Java onto corporate machines.

If you sell to a bank and that bank doesn't allow Java on their desktops some of the machines are restored every night then targeting JavaFx for your solution isn't going to work. Sun also need to eat their own dog food. Let's see some applets start to appear on Sun's web pages. Why no re-write www.

If Sun don't start to use JavaFX and applet solutions, they can't expect anyone else to use it. Does that still happen? The problem might be getting them to move from whatever their certified version is I still see a lot of 1. Applet's reputation and Sun's bungling is a significant barrier to adoption in more shops. I wish we would see the same improvements for JavaDoc. Especially the examples and profiling are helpfull for API docs. I do not agree that u10 made java more pleasant. It is still slow and instable as applets. Is your profile up-to-date? Please take a moment to review and update.

Java FX Technology Preview. Nov 10, 10 min read by Charles Humble.

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It targets two distinct user groups:. JavaFX Script has strong productivity features including some convenient predicate features for insert and delete operations insert 10 before x[1]; for example. Other common problems are elegantly solved: Sun has put a great deal of emphasis on the readability of the language making it easy to pick up and follow other developers' code.

It also supports 'not' although support for '! It really doesn't take long to get used to this but given the target audience I did find it surprising. There are a couple of other surprises in the language too. Another is that that JavaFX Script chooses to support multiple inheritance in place of Java's interface approach. JavaFX overhauls a number of ideas familiar from Java itself.

One worthy of attention is the Javadoc equivalent JavaFXDoc which makes some much needed updates to the documentation tool. The new output format doesn't use frames, and can easily be skinned using CSS.

Java FX Technology Preview

It also allows for some basic filtering for individual profiles — so for example the JavaFX APIs are split into common, desktop and mobile profiles and the documentation can be filtered as appropriate. There is an example of the output here. The focus on productivity is evident here too with JavaFXDoc supporting inline examples via an examples tag. Example code is output with syntax highlighting automatically generated, and the doc tool then compiles and executes the example putting a screen shot into the generated document thus providing an automated way of keeping documentation screen shots up-to-date.

We talked to Marinacci about future plans for the tool and he confirmed that Sun were working on a search solution, although this isn't expected for the version 1 release. An update to the core Javadoc tool is on the provisional list for Java 7 and he confirmed that a number of the lessons learnt from the work on JavaFXDoc will be applied to future versions of Javadoc.

The two key ones are the media APIs currently provided as native libraries that will be supplemented with the cross-platform On2 TrueMotion video codecs in the version 1 release and the scene graph API. Here the GUI is represented as a hierarchy of visual nodes that make up a scene and respond to user interaction. The scene graph model supports effects, arbitrary transformations scaling and rotations , and animation. The scene graph retains the graphics objects and draws them on the scene whenever a refresh happens thereby abstracting away the details of handling repaints, caching, and many other details familiar from working with immediate mode APIs like Java2D.

This level of abstraction also allows the API to do all sorts of automatic optimisation as well such as preloading textures and primitives to the graphics card.

Sun has split the APIs into three profiles two of which are available now: The common profile is for all the APIs that are available on every device and includes the scene graph API and media components, whilst the desktop profile represents the more familiar Swing components. The third is the mobile profile which is expected to be released during and is expected to be a complete application stack for mobile handset developers but the publically available details remain sketchy.

This release version should feel a little more complete and consistent. The decision to develop a new language rather than following Adobe's lead here is a bold one and I think a good one. JavaFX Script is generally very pleasant to work with and has a number of possible uses beyond its current application - for example the JavaFX data format FXD , a key part of project Nile, uses a subset of the JavaFX Script declarative format to represent graphic resources.

With Silverlight, Microsoft delivered its own toolset the Expression suite to directly take on Adobe's Creative Suite offerings. Sun is also working on its own tool expected next year but has chosen via Project Nile to first focus on supporting the popular existing tools starting with Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop. A designer working with one of the Adobe tools creates their graphic resource in the usual way and can then export the file to FXD.

The viewer utility allows users to view the graphics file to confirm that the exported file looks as expected. From within the JavaFX scripting language developers are able to access and manipulate the individual layers that make up a single graphic resource file. This works well for graphic resources but still leaves the problem of applying custom styling to the basic components.

Underpinning all of this work is Java 6 Update 10 formally the consumer JRE project — improvements to deployment, performance, memory usage and the built in look and feel Nimbus all help the effectiveness of Swing as a desktop development platform. Unfortunately this is quite a limiting factor for developers at the moment. Whilst Sun has shipped versions of update 10 for Linux and Solaris as well as Windows there are crucial implementation differences between the versions with the applet quickstarter, kernel installer, and direct3D pipleine all restricted to the Windows platform only.

He also gave us up-to-date download figures:. That both Flash and Silverlight are entirely closed source proprietary tools remains a significant barrier to adoption in some developer shops. Moreover given that so much of the key code in Flash, such as its audio and video codecs, is licensed from third party sources it would be very difficult for Adobe to open up the platform in the way Sun did with Java. Although the licenses are not yet finalised Sun has committed to making JavaFX available as open source software, and has so far released the compiler and scene graph APIs under the GPL v.

This may well boost its adoption when the platform is released but it still has significant work to do to become a strong contender. Join a community of over , senior developers. You need to Register an InfoQ account or Login or login to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered. Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion. JavaFX is taking to much time. Microsoft already have a 2. So when it will be released? I think JFX 1.

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