I just attended ‘JavaFX in practice’ by Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky
at Devoxx’09. JavaFX is a new technology that just came out the 4th of December (let’s say the 1.0 release came out).
JavaFX is in my opinion Sun counterattacking Adobe Flex/Flash. In this way that you can achieve the same thing with Flex/Flash as with JavaFX only it’s much easier for a Java Developer to start with it.
JavaFX also seamlessly integrates with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, this making it easy for a developer not to care about graphics at all. The designer does his work in their application while the developer develops the application in his favourite IDE (Currently Netbeans 🙁 is best supported).
The graphic guy/girl can just export their psd or illustrator file for JavaFX and the developer can use the .fxz file in JavaFX.
JavaFX is a scripting language that looks like Java. It is also very easy to set callbacks from and to a Java application. Integration in Swing (and the other way around) is also possible.
Sun is activelly developing/enhancing JavaFx. JavaFX 1.1 will be released in February and a 1.5 release is planned for June 2009.
Now it is only a question on who and how many will adept JavaFX for RIA’s that would normally be build with Flash and Actionscript.