JavaFX Preview SDK finally released !

As promised by Sun MicroSystem, the long awaited and widely anticipated JavaFX Preview SDK is officially released in July, just a day before August. Touted as a answer to Adobe’s Flex/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight, JavaFX competes by leveraging on a new scripting language, aka JavaFx Scipt, and a rich Java ecosystem and infrastructure. Since it first unveiled to the public in the JavaOne 2007, JavaFX becomes the source of interest as well as confusion to many Java developers. Many developers lament why the need for another language and why not improve Swing, the GUI toolkit library  ?  Well, RIA markets are now evolved to appeal to designers and not only  to developers through creating a declarative language that much easier to learn and use while still allow flexibility and power through the core programmatic language. For example, Flex used MXML based on XML as a foundation to build UI with strong data binding capability and ActionScript for programming. Similarly, JavaFX uses JavaFX Script to create UI and Java to extend the application further. Why switch to JavaFX when competitors are already have version of products ahead of JavaFX ?  Among the major reasons are existing Java developers can leverage on myriad existing Java open source libraries, existing investment and develop JavaFX application using state of art and powerful IDE like NetBeans, Eclipse and Intellij. Beside, another outstanding  component of JavaFX technology aka JavaFX Mobile, will give a boost in creating rich and powerful mobile application by having almost a full-blown Java SDK built into the phone compare to the limited environment of J2ME. The greatest advantage is that the same desktop application built with JavaFX can be used in the JavaFX-based mobile phone without changing the code base. 

The final version of JavaFX SDK will be released later in this year, and JavaFX Mobile will be unveiled next year. Nonetheless, in the meantime, you can start learning JavaFX to build cool rich internet application by downloading the JavaFX Preview SDK first and then following some exciting tutorial from Jim Weaver’s JavaFX blog

Latest Update after installing JavaFX Preview SDK at 11pm 31July08

I have just installed Netbean 6.1 with JavaFX, and this is what I get

I hate to be sarcastic but can someone tell me what went wrong ? On the right panel is those JavaFX components , and on the left it register error. Isn’t the software suppose to work out of the box ? Look like it is broken before it get started. Did someone has the same experience and error message or is it just me ?  I have uninstalled and reinstall the software by few times. Not very encouraging. Look like today is really not my day .

Maybe someone can teach me how to fix this problem.

 

 

Update 2: Problem finally solved ! at 1:30am at 1Aug08

If you get the above errors, you have to remove the previous netbean setting by going to User directory (for Windows Vista) and then into the directory of the login name. Remove all netbean directories eg it has something lik .netbean or .nb  prefix. It is probably the settings that conflict with JavaFX that caused the above mentioned problem. After resolving this issue, NetBeans with JavaFX works perfectly.

Now I can have a good night sleep !