Yesterday, at JavaOne Sun announced it’s OpenJFX project, backing up the new and shiny JavaFX product family.

JavaFX is Sun’s new product family based on Java technologies aimed at the Rich Internet Application market. What is strange is that JavaFX seems desktop and mobile device-oriented, no information about web browsers or browser integration. Of course, the possibility to use it in applets remains, hope it will be lite.
JavaFX is more similar to Java WebStart than to RIA technologies like Flash/Flex but the demos on openjfx.dev.java.net look damn good to me, even as standalone applications.

JavaFX Script is the cherry on top of JavaFX. It’s a statically typed scripting/programming language intended for rich UI’s that can work with Swing, Java2D and Java3D and it’s superb.
If you ever read about F3, well this is it, in it’s “production ready form”.

Just look at how easy is to fill an area with a linear gradient:

fill: LinearGradient {
x1: 0
y1: 0
x2: 1
y2: 0
stops:
[Stop {offset: 0, color: green},
Stop {offset: .5, color: new Color(.5, 1, 0, 1)},
Stop {offset: 1, color: green}]
}

you can call me nuts, but I just love it.

The best part is that JavaFX Scripts will run on JavaFX Mobile, bringing us the power to design applications that will run on both desktop and mobile devices in a polite write-once Java fashion.

For a little example of JavaFX‘s shiny look, here are some demo screen shots:

Just waiting to see how JavaFX affects the RIA world. Flex would better watch out .

Links:
http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/ – JavaFX home
https://openjfx.dev.java.net/ – OpenJFX home