Jasper and I are back at the hotel working on writing blogs and building the site design and thinking a lot about JavaOne 2009 which has just about come to an end, and about what our direction is going to be for the next year for Controls and JavaFX in general.

I think we delivered more in JavaFX 1.2 on the vision, but we still haven’t released the complete vision. JavaFX 1.2 was a lot of work, and we got a tremendous amount done, much of which was the hard work of engineering the lower levels of the scene graph and rendering pipelines, paving the way for some hopefully radical improvements in startup, footprint, and rendering speed over the next couple releases.

We also have released our first set of user interface controls and charts libraries which was really exciting. I think we’ve got a strong foundation upon which to build, and hopefully see a community start to grow around this work and build upon it as well.

Amy Fowler has done some amazing work on the layout engine for FX. When used correctly, the complexity of the code goes down and the performance goes up. We’re still learning a bit with these APIs as to how to best build apps, and learning some best practices around them. One of my favorites is using Panels.

We’re going to be blogging about all these things and more.

JavaOne, as usual, has been great for networking and meeting friends from throughout the industry. We had a nice meetup with Hans and Chet (who are at Adobe working on Flex) and my good friend Romain Guy (working on Android) and Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (Mozilla) and Joe Nuxoll, Carl Quinn, Dick Wall, and Tor Norbye (the JavaPosse).

It has also been great to get to see members of our team who are not local. I wanted to give a special shout-out to some of the people on our team that don’t usually “make the papers” — David Grieve who has stepped up and become our CSS guru; Paru Somashekar who has been helping fix all the bugs I put into the platform; and Stuart Marks who’s feedback on the scenegraph and control APIs has been invaluable.

Now its time for a little rest and relaxation to get ready for the next major push for JavaFX 1.3!