Simon’s Blog

Yesterday, I wrote up my first impressions of the new JavaFX 1.0 Runtime.   I said then that, despite some bugs (which I expected, given that platform is all-new and had very little no testing), and some deployment usability issues (which I really wish some Sun folks would accept are usability issues), it was a strong enough start for us to evaluate for a real project.  Today, I spent an hour with the JavaFX 1.0 SDK and the Netbeans 6.5 IDE, to get a feel for this new development platform.  Given the short amount of time I’ve spent with the SDK, this is obviously not a a full review. Rather, these are just my first impressions…

The Good

• There’s no doubt about it: developing JavaFX Script software using the Netbeans 6.5 IDE is an enjoyable experience, and it’s super-productive too.  In less than ten minutes, I’d learnt enough about the language to write useful software – nothing fancy, but I could build apps from scratch with interactive graphics and text etc.
• The ease by which you can build great-looking software that runs both in browsers and on mobile phones is simply stunning.  If Sun (and its partners) delivers on the technology going forward – JavaFX Desktop and JavaFX Mobile are going to be a real game changers for RIA development.   I think developers are going to love the fact that they can write to the browser and to the phone with a single code-base. There’s something very cool about clicking a radio button to test out your code in a desktop browser, and clicking another radio button to test out the same code in a mobile emulator.
• The dynamic UI preview window works pretty well (aside from the odd bug – see below).
• Testing applets is fantastic.  Just click the build button in the Netbeans, and the IDE does the rest: compiles the code; deploys it to a local web-server, including a web-page to display the applet.; fires up a web browser and opens it at the right place.  It makes for a super-productive test cycle.

The Bad

• Not much.  I found a couple of bugs in my quick tests today.  One is that neither the dynamic preview window in Netbeans, nor the mobile emulator correctly display the background fills for the stage.  The other bug was that an animation displayed completely differently on the Desktop when compared to the Mobile emulator.

The Ugly

• Didn’t find anything that I thought was really awful during this early testing.

Bottom Line

With the caveat that I’ve only spent a short time with the platform, here then, are my conclusions. If you’re an experienced Swing and Java developer, I think you will find JavaFX Script a really easy language to to pick up quickly.    I suspect you’re going to enjoy working in JavaFX Script a whole lot more than you might think – it’s genuinely a fun, powerful and productive language to work in.  If you’ve been wondering whether to make time to try JavaFX Script out – I’d really recommend you set aside a couple of hours, and give it a go to see if you like it.