Ask the Experts: JavaFX Preview, August 18-22
If you have a question about the JavaFX Preview, post your questions during this session and get answers from members of Sun's JavaFX engineering team: Josh Marinacci, Martin Brehovsky, and Larry McDonough.
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JavaFX confuses me a bit. It seems a late to the game, we can be like Flash--and oh, yeah!, Silverlight--layer for Java. There's nothing wrong with actively competing with the Adobe and Microsoft franchises. Indeed, I and others welcome that. But it seems to take Java into areas like visual design (and thus visual design tools, users who are visual designers not programmers, etc) where Java's been traditionally very weak. So up-leveling the user experience, great! Up-leveling the level of Java (ie SE not ME) for more capable mobile devices, great, if you can get device mfgs. and carriers to go along. But entering the UI and visual effects space, with all new APIs and homebrew scripting language...not clear to me how this becomes more than Sun's pet project. Not hating on JavaFX here...just trying to understand.
Posted by Jonathan Eunice on August 16, 2008 at 05:17 AM PDT #
Jonathan,
Many of the graphical capabilities we're touting with JavaFX are already available in Java, but you don't see them used very often because it requires a deep understanding of the platform. JavaFX provides people with a far simpler way of leveraging these powerful capabilities through an easy to use declarative, statically-typed scripting language that is simple to use and allows people to develop layouts using a format that matches how the user interfaces look. JavaFX allows them to incorporate rich animations, transformations, 2D and 3D graphics and rich text with ease and also adds a cross-platform media codec to allow people to incorporate multimedia content across any device running JavaFX. The key idea is that JavaFX extends the power and capability of Java by making it significantly easier to create rich, immersive experiences across multiple screens including browser/desktop, mobile, TV and more.
Also key to JavaFX is the developer / designer workflow and this is one of the areas where we're putting significant effort and really changing our game. Through Project Nile, you can take graphical assets created in design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator as well as SVG graphics, and incorporate them directly into your JavaFX applications. You can then manipulate the various layers of the assets directly from JavaFX. As RIA's get more and more advanced they require more than great visual effects and media integration. For these advanced applications, you can pull in Java Libraries and knit together all the pieces using JavaFX. In essence, JavaFX acts as the glue and the framework that brings together all of the aspects of the designer and developer workflow!
At this point, the JavaFX Preview SDK is aimed squarely at web-style developers that are comfortable rolling up their sleeves and working at a scripting level. Through the workflow that we are building, they can incorporate more advanced functionality by pulling in Java code as well as incorporate and manipulate graphical elements through Project Nile. As we move forward, we will continue to add more visually-oriented design capabilities to make it even easier for people to create rich interfaces and effects with JavaFX
Posted by Jacob Lehrbaum on August 19, 2008 at 12:20 PM PDT #