Tomorrow, JavaFX becomes a reality

JavaFX 1.0 will be released tomorrow (Dec 4th). Chris Oliver invites us to judge for ourselves if this project delivers on the promise of an improved user experience for rich clients in the Java Platform.

I remember well when this technology was announced at last year’s JavaOne. Chris’ demos impressed the audience, and in his sessions he showed off a really cool JFX powered PDF reader (sadly, I don’t think they ever released this demo). Yet, there was and has been lots of skepticism about the project, or maybe I should say about client side development in Java. Part of this has had to do with startup times, and bad implementations of the Java Plug-in. Lots of enhancements have been done in these areas, in part motivated I think, by client side initiatives like JavaFX.

Anyways, it will be fun to finally download and try out version 1.0 of this technology. What I’m hoping is that Sun has stepped up in their tooling for this, and that the download comes with a good set of useful demos that spark the creativity of both designers and developers. We’ll see.

I’ll have more to write about this once I try it out, there were a couple of projects (yes, one of them was a follow up to my JFX Clock example) I was working on using earlier versions of JFX but I’ve been waiting for the final release to continue these projects. Over the few weeks/months I should post a lot more examples and impressions of this. Stay tuned.

BTW: I noticed my JRE was automagically updated to 1.6 update 11, probably in preparation for tomorrow’s release? I’m a bit unclear on how JFX is being “pushed out” to existing JRE installations.