Chapter 37
Bringing JavaFX to the Mix
JavaFX was designed to serve as a tool for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). It is meant to compete with such RIA tools as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. The competing technologies use two languages for creating RIAs — one for declarative definition of the UI components, and another for the coding of processing logic. Adobe Flex uses MXML for UI components and ActionScript for processing logic. Microsoft Silverlight uses XAML for UI components and one of the .NET languages (such as C#) for processing.
JavaFX was originally designed to use JavaFX Script for UI components and Java for processing logic. But recently things changed, and up to the last minute I wasn’t sure if this lesson should be included in the book. Oracle has announced that JavaFX will be undergoing a major redesign in 2011. JavaFX 1.3 includes the JavaFX Script language, but JavaFX 2.0 will be completely Java-based.
Currently, no pre-release version of JavaFX 2.0 is available, and there is a chance that whatever you read about the client portion of this lesson’s application will be outdated. But no matter what changes in JavaFX 2.0, the deployed application will run in JVM with the installed JavaFX run time. There is also hope that the Java community will continue supporting the open-source version of JavaFX Script.
This lesson is not an introduction to JavaFX programming, but rather an overview of an application that uses multiple technologies you are already ...
