JavaFX 2.0

by Richard Bair | Sep 21, 2010 | General, News

Yesterday morning at JavaOne I gave a presentation called “JavaFX 2.0” (which will be repeated Thursday afternoon, and again October 5th at the SVJUGFX). There were several announcements both in the talk and in Thomas Kurian’s JavaOne keynote last night as well.

Yesterday we announced the roadmap for JavaFX 2.0. If you haven’t read through it yet you should stop now and go over and read the roadmap. There are a fair number of features going into JavaFX 2.0 and we’ve identified which will be available for the early access (EA) build, the beta build, an the final general availability (GA) build. There are some really great things on there such as fully hardware accelerated graphics pipeline (Prism), High-def media, a TableView control, CSS animations and layout, and much more.

In general, JavaFX 2.0 is a continuation of JavaFX 1.0. There is, however, one big change and that is with the language. JavaFX Script won’t be updated by Oracle for JavaFX 2.0 to run on that platform. Some folks in the community have expressed interest in taking on this task themselves — and I wholeheartedly encourage this. The JavaFX Script compiler is already open source. We haven’t worked out the details but I would imagine we’d rather add community members as owners of the project than have it fork.

Up to this point the only language that could be used to build JavaFX applications was JavaFX Script. I always felt this was a needless restriction. In addition, I felt that it was actually a bad thing for JavaFX Script the language for a couple of reasons. First, since all our APIs were in JavaFX Script, it meant that JavaFX Script had to be changed to be a good language for writing APIs, whereas it was originally designed to be a good language for scripting UIs. Sometimes this created a design tension. The compiler guys very wisely kept the focus on scripting UIs instead of writing APIs (which is why JavaFX Script was productive to use for building UIs), however it made our job on the platform team more difficult.

In addition, since the entire platform was built on the language, they didn’t have the freedom to fix certain issues in the language (such as initialization, which admittedly was mostly a problem for folks building libraries). My feeling is that decoupling JavaFX from JavaFX Script frees the language so that it can continue to evolve. Most languages have years to mature before becoming stable. JavaFX Script had a few months. It is to the credit of the compiler team and Brian Goetz especially that it came out as well as it did in the end.

So even though Oracle itself isn’t going to be committing to updating and shipping JavaFX Script in the JavaFX 2.0 timeframe, I sincerely wish to see it continue to evolve and improve. The same Binding capabilities that JavaFX Script enjoyed will be exposed as a library in Java, so any updated JavaFX Script compiler will have the tools it needs to implement language binding. Also, we’re working on the initialization issue such that object literals will still be possible (we’re considering several forms of initialization including the builder pattern).

In addition, I’m very excited to see what other languages can do / will do. Charles Nutter tweeted “Perfect storm: Mirah plus JavaFX APIs.” (Sorry I’m not a very good twitter person, I’m not sure how to link to the tweet!). I couldn’t agree more, I’m very interested in what Mirah would look like for building UIs on JavaFX. Especially if a variant of it could support bind in the language (which would be incredible). Already JRuby and Groovy work quite well with our current Java-based APIs.

Of course in the world of soundbites, what we see is “JavaFX is dead” (which is obviously not the case if you have seen any of Thomas Kurian’s keynote from last night), and “JavaFX Script is dead” (which is also not the case — it is open source and many of the strongest proponents have been in the community).

JavaFX is core to the strategy for rich client application development at Oracle. Simply put, JavaFX is the evolution of the Java rich client designed to address the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s customers. This is all about making Java dominant on the client. Jasper will post some videos of actual live demos we ran on stage at JavaOne (I hope he gets it up on youtube so it will be viral. Apologies if we use a flash player… for now!).

We have a lot of work to do. I think there will be critics and doubters along the way — but that’s fine. I welcome that. Judge us by what we ship, not what we say. I think JavaFX 1.3.1 was a great release (all of the stuff Jasper is showing in his demo is achievable with the APIs in 1.3.1 + the media and prism implementations for JavaFX 2.0). I’m really looking forward to delivering the next version of JavaFX.

Finally, we’re hiring! I’m looking for people who are talented, passionate, and have a good attitude. We have put together a really great team with a great atmosphere and we’re committed to engineering the best platform. If you think you’d be interested, drop me a line. We have positions in UI Controls, text, graphics, media, deployment, management, and more. Just drop me a line at my oracle email address and I’ll forward your info along into the system.

Top 10 Changes in JavaFX 1.3

by Richard Jasper and Jonathan | Apr 23, 2010 | General, News

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!