FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.

For months and months we’ve been focused solely on the mechanics of building a platform — API design, writing tests, fixing bugs, use cases, features, documentation etc — and with the release of the beta the #1 question on everyone’s mind is, “Is JavaFX 2.0 cross platform?!”. That the beta is initially a windows-only beta has apparently stirred up a fair amount of concern. Shockingly, some people have even asked whether we ever intend to be cross platform. I can say definitively “Yes, of course!”. It would be quite illogical for any platform released by the Java team to not be cross platform. And even more so for the Java team to release a platform which had no intention of being cross platform while also purporting that the said platform was to be the next generation Java rich client platform.

We absolutely will be targeting a whole host of different platforms, not even just the big three (Mac, Linux, Windows). The value of the Java platform is in the fact that you can write across multiple operating systems and devices.

Now, somewhat like Apple, Oracle doesn’t tend to make premature announcements. I cannot at this time comment on when support for different platforms will be available, but hope to comment when such announcements have been made through the official channels. I know that this form of communication strategy leaves people to their own imagination which, as often as not, seems to be rather pessimistic in nature :-). So, to help provide some guidance here, I’d just like to say:

JavaFX will be cross platform.