Lots of people are playing around with JavaFX now and trying out new and different things. Here are some great blogs with interesting JavaFX experiments.

• Stuart Marks blogs about interesting language details of JavaFX Script.
• The JavaFX Journey is one developers experiences building JavaFX games like Tower Defense and Missle Defender.
• Sten Anderson has some interesting visualization experiments with tag clouds.
• And of course Jim Weaver continues to blog, this time on how to use Effects APIs to do fun things.

Vaibhav has just updated his blog to include webstart links for all of his samples. If you haven't seen is blog before you should go check it out. He's got lots of cool examples with full code, including Spring Motion with a real spring, 3D buttons, and a pendulum with gravity effects.

In this article Dean Iverson shows how to use MigLayout, a powerful layout manager from the Swing world that is now available in JavaFX.

This afternoon eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza posted his JavaFX 1.0 review and noted, "the JavaFX platform shows promise of being a very important player in the burgeoning RIA category, and it compares very well with the 1.0 releases of Adobe's and Microsoft's RIA platforms."

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JavaLobby has a great interview with Stephen Chin, creator of the WidgetFX widget system, one of the first big open source applications built with JavaFX. Stephen talks about why he created WidgetFX, the things he learned, and his upcoming book.

Widget FX, an open source desktop widget system written entirely in JavaFX has just hit it's 1.0 release. This release includes full support for JavaFX 1.0 and has a brand new dock theme.

WidgetFX is one of the first open source projects to be built on top of JavaFX. It ships with a clock, photo viewer, and RSS reader, though more widgets are on the way.

For the full feature list check out Stephen Chin's blog entry on the release and the the main WidgetFX.org website.

Chris Campbell, designer of the pixel effects infrastructure in JavaFX, has just posted the first in a series of blogs describing of how to use the effects layer, including a running sample.

JavaFX has been out for a couple of weeks now and the response has been great. Clearly there are bugs to work on and features to add, but the core is powerful and ready to go. One feature I've gotten lots of requests for is the ability to mix Swing with JavaFX code and graphics. The JavaFX samples page has an example of how to embed an existing Swing component or panel in your JavaFX application. However, we don't have an example of how to do the reverse: embed a JavaFX scene in your Swing application. I asked Rich and Jasper about this and they had the same need as well. After a long train ride to Devoxx this is the code they came up with.

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Today we released an update for the JavaFX 1.0 platform. This update is now included as part of the JavaFX downloads. 

 JavaFX 1.0 SDK Update 1 provides the following enhancements:

• This release contains performance enhancements that enable smoother playback of large video files on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows platforms. It contains functional changes that enable video to be played as it progressively downloads from a remote server through HTTP requests.
  
• Progressive downloading is now enabled for WMV, FLV, and FXM video files on the Microsoft platform. The video startup time on the Microsoft Windows platform has been improved in this release.
  
• Forward-seeking is now enabled for FLV and FXM files on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, when seeking within the currently downloaded buffer. Seeking beyond the buffer is not currently supported.

Release notes for the update are available here. You can see the video enhancements in action here.

We've also released a new tutorial - Deploy A Rich Internet Application Developed With JavaFX Technology on javafx.com. This tutorial guides readers through the different options for deploying JavaFX applications as Java Web Start (JNLP), Java applet, or stand-alone applications on the desktop, in a browser, or using the JavaFX Mobile Emulator.

I'm in the London airport awaiting my flight back home. After an exhausting week at Devoxx it will be good to be home and on vacation until the end of the year. And what a year it has been. At JavaOne we showed new JavaFX features and gave a roadmap for the JavaFX preview and final release. Now, six months later, we have hit every milestone and JavaFX 1.0 is out for the world to play with and build on. It feels immensely satisfying (and tiring) to have the bits out there.

Devoxx was definitely a success. This was my first trip to the illustrious conference. All I knew was that it was held in a movie theater. However, I was unprepared for the scope and size of the event. It's really the JavaOne of Europe, but with better beer.

I would say that JavaFX was a hit at Devoxx. There was a ton of interest and lots of questions. We are getting great feedback and certainly want more. All of the JavaFX sessions were well attended and I saw quite a few people hacking away in NetBeans with the new SDK.

Here's just a few important thing that happened recently in the JavaFX world.

• The bug database is public at http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/
• A new Eclipse plugin has been open sourced at http://kenai.com/projects/eplugin.
• We posted a short transition guide and linked to Stephen Chin's excellent guide based on his experience updating WidgetFX to the final release.

Over the coming weeks I'll have more blogs about JavaFX - Swing integration, how to use CSS, and other cool features you might have missed in the 1.0 release. And of course we have the final version of JavaFX Mobile coming out early next year. So stay tuned. And in the mean time, go play with JavaFX and tell us what you build.

The JavaFX GUI Tutorial has been translated into Chinese. I encourage our chinese developers to go check it out.

- j

The JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse has just been open sourced under BSD license! You can check it out at http://kenai.com/projects/eplugin. Octavian Tanase has more details on his blog.

JavaFX has a very rich language and set of APIs which have changed quite a bit on their way to the 1.0 release. If you wrote code with the preview release last July, or an even earlier release, then you will notice that your code no longer compiles. If you'd like to update your old code, then this is the blog for you. It would be impossible to list everything that has changed (even since the preview release in July), but here is a quick list of the big changes and a link to learn more.

Step 1: Make sure you have the new NetBeans 6.5 + JavaFX SDK bundle. Tons of things have changed so you *must* have the new bits.

Step 2: If you have an existing JavaFX project, when you open it be sure to change the JavaFX SDK used to the latest one in your Project Properties.

Step 3: Compile and see what breaks. Here's what I typically change, in order:

• attribute to var
• operation to function
• private to nothing. variables are private by default now
• static, move static functions and variables outside of your class definition
• change javafx.ui imports to javafx.scene. (if you have code from back then)
• javafx.scene to javafx.scene.* we split out lots of packages. For example, images are in javafx.scene.image, and colors are in javafx.scene.paint
• javafx.input to javafx.scene.input
• Frame, Window and Dialog are gone. Use javafx.stage.Stage instead.
• Canvas is gone, use javafx.stage.Scene instead
• System.out.println to println. println is built in now, so you don't need the Java version.

For a more detailed list of changes please read Stephen Chin's blog entry on the topic. Stephen has moved a rather large codebase, WidgetFX, so he put together a very comprehensive summary. Thanks Steve!

One of the big motivations behind JavaFX is the need for media. Today's forward looking applications don't just use graphics and animation, but also video and audio. JavaFX includes media support right out of the box to let you build cool apps with very little code. You can play an mp3 with little more than the line MediaPlayer { media: Media { url: "http://awesome.com/music.mp3" } }. JavaFX supports a wide variety of media formats depending on your platform, including a set of cross-platform codecs that are guaranteed to work anywhere JavaFX is supported. You can see the complete list here in the FAQ.

As I've mentioned before, this is our first release. Our excitement to get you the bits is driving us crazy and if you stress the media stack, you will discover some of the places that need a little more work. We know about these soft spots and are addressing them in our patch release to come out very soon. All of these issues are listed in our release notes, but among them you'll find that playing more than one high-resolution or large WMV movie on Windows can take a long time to load or freeze. This is also true for videos played over a very low bandwidth network connection. There are also some known issues with "Repeat" not being honored. But hey, why would you want to watch the video again anyway? :-) For each of these cases, we have work-arounds for you in the release notes that you may find helpful.

Head over to the Samples section to check out our media demos and see some of the players that we wrote. Then read the Media Browser Tutorial that will show you how to get started writing media apps. It's very easy to work with media in JavaFX. Even our marketing manager can do it!

With the technical glitch on javafx.com solved, check out what other people have been saying about today's release of JavaFX 1.0.

There will be video replay of the on stage activities from the JavaFX Launch Party available tomorrow. In the meantime, and perhaps for some of the offstage activities, come follow the JavaFX launch event via Twitter, starting soon !