I ‘ve started looking into JavaFX and plan to publish a couple of articles going through development of an application that real-world software developers can relate to. Enough of the demos of bubbles moving up and down in a glass with water. Can ‘t recall any application in my rather long career that would require to program something like this.

While looking at the JavaFX way to do stuff, I subconsciously compare it with Flex. So far as expected, Flex is a hundred miles ahead. But to be fair, one shouldn ‘t forget that we are comparing products of 1.0 and 3.0 versions. At this point, JavaFX would require to do a lot more of manual coding in Java than I ‘d like to see.

Lack of such important components as data grid would require you to wrap Java ‘s JTable and program to it. You need to program such basic things as a hyperlink component…

Eclipse plugin for JavaFX is not real. As of today (January of 2009), to use JavaFX you need to install NetBeans 6.5 and have a background of a Java Swing programmer, which will be an obstacle for many Java developers.

But, let ‘s give this product a little bit of time to mature.

I ‘ll write my first JavaFX article for Java Developer ‘s Journal in February. BTW, have you seen a new look of JDJ and Flex Developer ‘s Journal ? Expect some more very interesting announcements from sys-con that may turn you into a published author. Just keep an eye on the word Ulitzer.

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