Java FX | A Powerful Platform

Today, in the age of Web 2.0, AJAX, and the iPhone, users have come to expect their applications to provide a dynamic and engaging user interface that delivers rich graphical content, audio, and video, all wrapped in GUI controls with animated cinematic-like interactions. They want their applications to be connected to the web of information and social networks available on the Internet. Developers, on the other hand, have become accustomed to tools such as AJAX/HTML5 toolkits, Flex/Flash, Google Web Toolkit, Eclipse/NetBeans RCP, and others that allow them to build and deploy rich and web-connected client applications quickly. They expect their development languages to be expressive with features that liberate them from the tyranny of verbosity and empower them with the ability to express their intents declaratively.

During the early days of the Web, the Java platform was the first to introduce rich content and interactivity in the browser using the applet technology (predating JavaScript and even Flash). Not too long after applets appeared, Swing was introduced as the unifying framework to create feature-rich applications for the desktop and the browser. Over the years, Swing matured into an amazingly robust GUI technology used to create rich desktop applications. However powerful Swing is, its massive API stack lacks the lightweight higher abstractions that application and content developers have been using in other development environments. Furthermore, the applet's plugin technology was (as admitted by Sun) neglected and failed in the browser-hosted rich applications against similar technologies such as Flash.

 The JavaFX is Sun's (now part of Oracle) answer to the next generation of rich, web-enabled, deeply interactive applications. JavaFX is a complete platform that includes a new language, development tools, build tools, deployment tools, and new runtimes to target desktop, browser, mobile, and entertainment devices such as televisions. While JavaFX is built on the Java platform, that is where the commonalities end. The new JavaFX scripting language is designed as a lightweight, expressive, and a dynamic language to create web-connected, engaging, visually appealing, and content-rich applications.

The JavaFX platform will appeal to both technical designers and developers alike. Designers will find JavaFX Script to be a simple, yet expressive language, perfectly suited for the integration of graphical assets when creating visually-rich client applications. Application developers, on the other hand, will find its lightweight, dynamic type inference system, and script-like feel a productivity booster, allowing them to express GUI layout, object relationship, and powerful two-way data bindings all using a declarative and easy syntax. Since JavaFX runs on the Java Platform, developers are able to reuse existing Java libraries directly from within JavaFX, tapping into the vast community of existing Java developers, vendors, and libraries.

The most fascinating thing about JavaFX is that we  need not take pain to install any third party plugins or include any external libraries, as it comes bundled with JRE, from Java7 onwards, in turn JavaFX leverages the extreme ubiquity, power, performance and security of the JRE. So we just need to install Java and you are ready to build FX applications with inbuilt library with utmost ease.

JavaFX provides a vivid range of functionality like animation, support for Canvas API, Multi-Touch Support and many more.JavaFX offers a dramatically shortened production cycle for designers and developers through its designer–developer workflow. JavaFX allows you to incorporate multimedia assets from popular third-party design tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop using the JavaFX Production Suite.

One other thing which I personally like in JavaFX is that , the FX application which is made is directly available as an executable JAR file as soon as the code is compiled , so it becomes pretty easy for distribution purposes . 

Feel free to post any queries in the the comments section I will be more than happy to answer them . I will be posting a basic FX game , FX Movie maker and FX Video player soon with the complete description of the code. So stay tuned , key in your email in 'Follow By Email' to get the notification as soon as I post .

Cheers!!