A few weeks ago we started assembling our own Top 10 change list for JavaFX 1.3. Stephen posted an excellent list of his own. Here’s our take! Over the next several weeks we will be writing about each of these topics in greater detail and link them back to this page. So without futher ado…

10. Amble Font
We’ve added some standard fonts to JavaFX which are available to all devices: desktop, mobile and tv. What this means to you is a single consistent set of fonts which look consistent on all platforms. Happiness all around!

09. Multiline Text Input
Finally(!!), JavaFX 1.3 brings support for multiline text input to the venerable TextBox. TextBox already worked for single-line single-style text input, and in 1.3 we added the ability for the TextBox to also support multiple lines of text!

08. ChoiceBox
One of the most hotly asked for new Controls was a ComboBox. ChoiceBox is a close cousin (and in our experience is used more frequently). The ChoiceBox is essentially a non-editable ComboBox. You can put any kind of data item in the ChoiceBox and let the user choose an item.

07. Layout Enhancements
A lot of work went into enhancing and simplifying the layout system in JavaFX 1.3. The majority of porting issues you will face going from 1.2 to 1.3 will be in the area of layout. It is faster, simpler, and ready for business.

06. Preview Controls
In 1.3 we have added a number of preview controls. Please try them out! They absolutely will change when they become final controls (including moving from the com.javafx.preview package in which they live), but we wanted to get them out as soon as possible so you can have a play and provide input into their continued development. In 1.3 the main preview controls are Menus (MenuItem, PopupMenu, MenuBar, etc) and TreeView. Try them out!

05. Custom List Cells
In JavaFX 1.2 we released a very lightweight ListView Control. It barely made the 1.2 release at all. In 1.3 we’ve extended it to support completely customizable cells. One of my major regrets was that ListView is still single selection in 1.3 (bummer). That being said, the ListView’s cell virtualization absolutely rocks.

04. Lazy Scenegraph
We’ve made the scenegraph lazier! What this means for you is much better performance. “Bind storms” have been eliminated from all bounds related aspects of the scenegraph, so now we don’t compute bounds unless you ask for them. We’ve seen major improvements in applications which once were limited by such bind storms.

03. JavaFX Compiler Rewrite
The JavaFX Compiler team has done it again! The JavaFX Compiler has seen some major improvements in this release, both in the type of code being generated and how those changes effect applications. The semantics of “bind” have been better defined, and all binding is now “lazy” to help quell bind storms (lazy binding means that a value is not recomputed when its inputs have changed, only when it is asked for a new value). We sometimes refer to this as “compiled bind” because in previous releases bindings were essentially interpreted whereas in 1.3 the compiler generates more bytecode for each binding which gives hotspot more to work with and, critically, reduces the dynamic footprint of a Node by 6-10x!

02. CSS
The biggest feature for the JavaFX UI Controls team in the 1.3 release is without a doubt the CSS support that was reengineered from the ground up, extended, and improved. It is also now available on all three platforms — desktop, mobile, and tv. We’re really excited about this support as it gives developers and designers much more freedom in how to style controls and really makes some very common use cases much, much simpler.

01. TV
Finally, in JavaFX 1.3 we have added an emulator for TV which allows you to develop JavaFX applications for the TV or TV set top boxes. This is the FX Experience #1 top change for JavaFX 1.3 as it completes the promise of having a platform targeting all three screens (desktop, mobile, tv). The TV implementation is based on the new prism 3D accelerated pipeline. We’re very excited to see where this leads and to put more heat into this and our other platforms in future releases.

If you haven’t yet, download JavaFX 1.3!