JavaFX: An Overview
JavaFX is a new family of products designed to enable the delivery of high-impact network-based content to consumers. The first member of this family, named JavaFX Mobile, is designed to be a complete, highly integrated mobile operating/application environment, which should reduce developers’ dependence on vendor-specific technologies, at the same time providing a standardized suite of productivity-enhancing frameworks, services and libraries.
The Linux-based JavaFX Mobile is clearly focussed on the increasingly powerful hand-held phones and PDAs. Nevertheless, Sun envisages the wider JavaFX product family as being a provider of a consistent and rich user-experience across device types, ranging from PDA to PCs, from TV sets to in-car applications.
However, if we take a step back from the Sun’s high-level descriptions and graphics, what really appears to be going on is that Sun wants a share of the market currently being fronted by the likes of Flash and Silverlight. Without going into the details of these technologies, one of the potential advantages of JavaFX Mobile is having the ability to develop high-impact content on top of the ubiquitous Java ME platform and the facilities provided therein. Yet although Java maintains a high degree of presence within the mobile software ecosystem, we are still along way off seeing whether Java is a sufficiently strong differentiating factor to significantly impact current trends.
Clearly of critical importance in this regard is the availability of development support for “high-impact”, which for lack of a formal definition, we will loosely assume to imply: animation effects, multi-media play-back, “glassy” effects like mirroring, fading, opacity etc.
Now, whilst Java’s out-of-the-box GUI offering – Swing – is suitable for the development of traditional, let’s say “low-impact” GUIs, JavaFX Script is designed to fill the gaps.
The reader may find the following links of interest:
- Canoo discerns JavaFX Script Hype from Fact with music pinboard
- Interview with James Gosling on JavaFX
- Artima (audio) interview with Sun’s Jacob Lehrbaum on JavaFX
- Creator of JavaFX Script, Chris Oliver’s weblog
- Sun’s JavaFX page
- Sun’s JavaFX Mobile page
- Mixed reactions to JavaFX at TheServerSide.COM
