JavaFX Script is dead, long live JavaFX

At the JavaOne conference currently taking place in San Francisco, Oracle has announced that version 2.0 of JavaFX, the development platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) launched by Sun in 2007, is now scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2011. Oracle has said that all JavaFX controls available at that time will, with this version, become available as open source code. Which open source licence Oracle will use remains an open question.

The mobile variant of the RIA technology appears to have been put on hold for the time being. Apparently JavaFX Script, the scripting language for programming JavaFX applications, will be discontinued. In future, the RIA framework will use the Java API instead of the scripting language. One of the advantages of this move could be that languages such as Groovy or Scala, which work on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), will become available for programming JavaFX applications.

The roadmap of JavaFX 2.0 includes a hardware-accelerated rendering engine and new user interface controls. The developers also plan to streamline the technology and optimise it for speed. Oracle said in a product announcement that its goal is to use the RIA technology to "deliver the best HTML5 and native application experience from a Java programming model,". Reportedly, JavaFX is to become a general visual abstraction layer capable of rendering to either a native Java 2d / OpenGL / Hotspot VM stack or to a JavaScript / HTML5 / web browser stack from the same API calls.

(trk)