JavaFX Script is officially dead.

Oracle has decided to continue investing in JavaFX as the UI platform for Java client applications, but at the same time they’ve realized that the JavaFX Script language was probably a limiting factor in the general adoption of their RIA technology.

History

On November 8, 2006, Sun engineer Chris Oliver published an entry in his blog introducing a project he had been working on called “F3″. His blog entry explained the general concepts behind the project;

My name is Chris Oliver. I came to Sun through their acquisition of Seebeyond in September 2005. I’d like to present something about my current work – it’s not public yet but it should be open-sourced on java.net shortly.

My project is called F3 which stands for “Form follows function”, and its purpose was to explore making GUI programming easier in general.

F3 is actually a declarative Java scripting language with static typing for good IDE support and compile-time error reporting (unlike JavaScript…), type-inference, declarative syntax, and automatic data-binding with full support for 2d graphics and standard Swing components as well as declarative animation. You can also import java classes, create new Java objects, call their methods, and implement Java interfaces.

Chris’ first blog post on F3 introduced code snippets showing off the main features of the language, and a follow up post had a set of very impressive demos meant to show off the language and how it could compete with other RIA technologies like Flash.

At JavaOne 2007 F3 was rebranded as JavaFX Script, and we were shown some cool demos, like this JavaFX PDF Reader which unfortunately was never released.

JavaFX 1.0 was released on December, 2008.

At JavaOne 2009, Sun showed off a much needed JavaFX designer tool. The demo showed how the tool would allow for visual design of JavaFX applications on different “screens” (desktop, mobile, TV, etc.). This tool hasn’t been released to the public, instead there’s a more developer oriented Netbeans plugin with Matisse like UI design capabilities that was released a while ago.

But it’s not Java

The complaint I would often hear from developers when talking about JavaFX is that it was not Java. Unlike Java, F3 was designed from the beginning with UIs in mind. Chris Oliver wanted the flexibility of a declarative language, and decided that XML was not the best fit for this, thus the need for the F3 language.

The problem was that the new language was very different from Java. I remember doing a JavaFX Script presentation for a JUG in Panama, and even after having written a few programs in it, the context switch between it and Java was quite big for me.

At the last JavaOne I attended, I could overhear a lot of people rejecting the idea of learning yet another new language just to do a Java based UI. Not only a new language, but one that was so different from what they were used to. People often forget that one of the reasons Java dominates the development landscape today is because it was so similar to it’s predecessors; C and C++. While the benefits of a new UI focused language are many (the binding features alone in JavaFX Script are a good example), one thing that I’ve noticed is that modern UIs are being done in less exotic ways; just take a look at the UI framework in Android which is Java language based and on iPhone which uses Objective C.

JavaFX technology in Java, and other languages

Oracle has published the proposed roadmap for JavaFX 2.0. The key standout feature listed there is “Port JavaFX Script APIs to Java”, which will make JavaFX not only easily available to Java developers but to those who use other dynamic languages like Scale, JRuby, Groovy, Javascript, etc. The roadmap also mentions support for lambda expressions (closures), which I can already see being very useful for UI programming.

There are other notable features listed there, like additional UI controls, web views and integration with HTML5, HD playback, etc. The roadmap mentions the binding API, I’m curious to see how it would be integrated in the core Java language.

I think Oracle has made the right move here, the JavaFX stack is already pretty advanced and shows a lot of promise. It should be used more, but was being hindered by the lack of adoption of JavaFX Script. Porting these APIs to Java, and supporting other dynamic languages should allow a lot more developers to leverage the power of JavaFX.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to include a bit of history at the beginning about F3. I wonder how Chris Oliver and the other engineers that worked so hard on the core JavaFX Script language feel about this development. Hopefully they feel pretty proud about their work, because even though the language is being dropped, it seems the core of JavaFX is pretty strong. Adoption should grow now that there is no “new language” excuse.

At least that’s what I’m hoping for.

The screenshot above is from Anthony Rogers’ blog (UI designer for the tool), and the next one is from Chris Oliver’s blog, who successfully managed to hide away from most of the geek crowds at JavaOne.

The design of the tool is looking really nice and clean, the timeline reminds me a bit of the Adobe Premiere CS4 one. But unlike Premiere or Flash CS4, one interesting design choice is the lack of row headers to identify the different elements or categories for the rows in the timeline. This makes it look a bit cleaner and less cluttered, but it would be interesting to see if this doesn’t make it more difficult to track just what it is you are supposed to be controlling in that part of the timeline. Hard to tell without trying the tool of course (hint, hint, Sun … available for alpha/beta testing!).

I haven’t seen a single bit of code in any of the screenshots/demos so far. I wouldn’t be surprised that there was some script text area somewhere, or maybe the expectation is that for code you go to a tool like Netbeans?

Tor Norbye also provides some additional information about the tool, it will be available as a webstart application that will let you save data in the “cloud” (like Google Docs) or locally, as well as run the tool online/offline.

Chris calls it the JavaFX Design tool, others the JavaFX Authoring tool, for sure neither of these is the final name for the product but I’m still a bit surprised it doesn’t seem to have any sort of funky codename at this point.

You can watch some short videos of the tool in action here.

During this morning’s JavaOne general session, the “James Gosling’s Toy Show”, Tor Norbye gave another preview of the “JavaFX Authoring Tool” (TODO: Needs a cool codename!!!).

In 2007 when I blogged about the original JavaFX announcement at that year’s JavaOne, one of my first questions was about the tooling. At first we basically just had JFXPad to play around, then came more integration with Netbeans. However, these are not designer tools, and a RIA application needs more access points of people who are not software developers. This was partially answered with the JavaFX plugins for tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but what was really missing was a visual place to bring content together interactively and created animated content.

So now we see glimpses of the JavaFX authoring environment that Sun plans to release. The tool seems to be in the early stages of development and it is unclear when it will be released. However, some of the features look very compeling and familiar. Like any of the versions of the Adobe Flash tools, it features a timeline with the ability to edit key frames and create animated transitions. It also allows you to drag and drop media and JFX components (including the new 1.2 controls) to compose your app.

The coolest feature is that the tool aims to deliver on the “multiple screens” theme of JFX, you can easily output your project for a JFX desktop application, mobile and the plan is to have output for TV applications.

The following videos demonstrate the basics of the tools …

And this next video features the visual binding feature that allows you to graphically bind properties between target and source objects, with inline display of the properties.

The tool looks nice, but it’s too early to compare it to any of the equivalent Adobe or Microsoft tools. To me this type of tool is key to adoption, so I wish the team the best of luck and that they hopefully find an effective way to get feedback via previews just do sanity checks on the tool (hint, hint, I wouldn’t mind preview access

One final note, I think there’s a need for a JFXMattise like tool. I don’t know if this tool is it, I don’t think so. Basically, maybe a subset of this tool, embedded in Netbeans that allows developer type people to visually compose their JFX applications, with an emphasis on visual UI control and layout composition. As it stands, I think there’s a big gap there even if this tool is released.

Update 1: I added another video showing how you can edit “multiple screens”. That is, tweak your JFX application in other devices with different resolutions out of a main project. In this case, you can have this full resolution application with several smaller windows targeted for mobile devices. The cool thing is that you can tweak one of the target devices to say have less buttons so it can still be tailored for other platforms.

Also Tor has posted a blog entry about the tool (which is the current project he’s working on).

Update 2: New screenshots of the JavaFX Design Tool