JavaFX 1.0 hits FCS! Come and get it!

After a lot of hard work, JavaFX 1.0 is finally out and available for download and play! I've been having a huge amount of fun with it over the past few months. Every marketoid and blogger at Sun is going nuts with it. They tend to emphasis using it for building Rich Internet Applications - RIA has been one of the big industry buzzwords over the past year. But I've been building regular desktop apps with it, and it's great. It's been really easy to build beautiful Solaris/Linux desktop tools (sorry, the Solaris/Linux release of JavaFX isn't ready yet, but you can suffer through using OS X or even Windows). If you're even slightly handy with Photoshop, you just sketch your UI with it, export to JavaFX, then write your own script bits to add behavior. With luck, a Gimp exporter will happen, although that'll probably have to be a community effort.

Take it out for a spin. I'm sure you'll have as much fun with it as I have.

December 4, 2008