JavaFX rides the RIA wave

Sun doesn’t want to fall behind competing rich internet application technologies and products such as Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Apollo. It introduced JavaFX at the JavaOne conference now in progress.

Rich Green, Sun’s executive vice president of software, said this about JavaFX.

What’s JavaFX? It’s a software product from Sun that allows any consumer electronics manufacturer to accelerate the delivery of Java/Linux based devices, from phones to set tops and dashboards and everything else imaginable. Without fear of format lock-in or disintermediation from a competitor. JavaFX is a product (not simply a technology), built on Java Standard Edition (the Java platform running on your desktop computer), that unites billions of Java SE and Java Micro Edition devices (Java Micro Edition is what runs on most of the world’s mobile handsets).

If I’ve made sense of all the talk around it, JavaFX is another layer on top of good old Java meant to let you build rich applications anywhere. JavaFX is supposed to be a family of products, and its first member is JavaFX Mobile.

JavaFX Mobile is a complete, pre-integrated software system for advanced mobile devices designed to enable developers to author rich, high-impact content and network-based services.

All members of the JavaFX family should at least share JavaFX Script. It’s a new scripting language for Java focused on user interfaces. You may have come across it under its development name, F3.

JavaFX Script is a simple scripting language designed to bring the benefit of the Java platform to creative professionals and web authors — independent of the device or audience they target. JavaFX Script adds to the list of languages already supported in the Java Virtual Machine, from PHP and Ruby, to Javascript and JavaFX Script — and brings the power, security and extraordinary popularity of the Java platform to those at the forefront of convergence: those defining interactive content for consumers.

From the FAQ.

Why do I need the JavaFX Script? Isn’t Swing good enough?

There’s nothing wrong with Swing. Swing is one of the best GUI development toolkits of its kind. Swing makes it very easy to create standard GUI components, buttons, listboxes, trees, and tables. Together with Java 2D, Swing makes it easy to customize existing components or to create new custom components to achieve virtually any desired visual effect. Sun is not replacing Swing with JavaFX; instead, JavaFX Script makes Swing much easier to use. With the new JavaFX Script language, the structure of the programmer’s code closely matches the actual layout of the GUI, making it tangibly easier to understand and maintain.

Reactions to JavaFX have been mixed so far. There’s a lot of publicity around it right now, so it’s hard to write anything more detailed. We’re planning to cover JavaFX in the next special JavaOne podcast.

Related articles

• Dev::Info — JavaFX (in Czech)
• InfoWorld — Sun’s JavaFX to take on AJAX, Silverlight
• Jonathan Schwarz — The Question Isn’t Where, It’s When…
• vnunet.com — Sun takes on Ajax, Apollo and Silverlight
• Cedric Otaku — The JavaFX disaster