JavaFX makes it across platform to Linux
A new Developer Preview of JavaFX 2.1 has been released by Oracle and now the cross platform user interface toolkit is available to download for Linux. When JavaFX 2.0 was released as a beta at the end of May 2011, many developers noted that the cross platform toolkit only ran on Windows. The problem was partly resolved with the release of JavaFX 2.0, which added Mac OS X support, but Linux support was still missing in action.
This was a major stumbling block for a number of developers and also for Oracle in its attempts to popularise the technology which it is positioning as the long term replacement for existing Java UI toolkits. With the new Linux developer preview, Oracle hopes to remedy that, especially as it is intent on open sourcing JavaFX 2.x, though currently the JavaFX code is still proprietary. The developer preview has only been tested on Ubuntu 10.04/JDK 7 update 2, but Oracle hopes users will test it on other Linux platforms and give them sufficient feedback to "make JavaFX for Linux a rock-solid implementation".
(djwm)