Dmitri

Even ActionScript is not an ideal language for doing this. JavaFX is at its heart, a kind of Java DSL for doing animation. It contains procedural elements as well as declarative elements. The idea of including temporal list comprehensions and duration operators as first class citizens is amazing.

Consider: x = [1..100] dur 1000 (let X take on the values from 1 to 100 over 1 second) vs a more Java/C syntax x.begin(1).end(100).over(1000). First class list comprehensions are nicer.

There is also the notion of binding variable expressions together, so that if one of the dependent variables is updated, the other expressions are calculated too. Think Excel spreadsheet. I could write “handposition = armposition + bodyposition” and “bodyposition = legposition + feetposition” The point is, if feetposiiton or legposition are updated, then bodyposition updates, and so on, recalculating all the dependencies.

This sort of thing requires constructing a master-dependency graph and doing topological sorts over all the dependencies in the program, and hence it is much simpler to do with a new language and DSL than to shoe-horn it into Java or Javascript.

I think Sun made the right decision, just way too late to make a difference.

Anyway, you can open a single file in Eclipse. I always use it to edit my poms.

yc

Parts of the original FAQ were a mistake and I sincerely apologize for the confusion it has caused. We have updated the FAQ to clarify that it will be open source and details will be forth coming. For a more succinct and official statement please see Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog where he says:

“JavaFX will, like all of Sun’s software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it’ll be released via the GPL (v2) license.”

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/rocking_the_free_world

Thanks,
Josh

PS. If you have any more questions please feel free to email me at joshua.marinacci@sun.com

Dmitri, I appreciate the work that has been done under Swing’s hood in Java2D. A new look, plugin, and media support is not what my customers need. They just want to get UI values into their domain object properties, want to persist a domain object in a background thread and block the UI. They want to understand how this whole thing shall work together. The JSR 296 is meets well what is essential to their business, and for almost all of them data binding is too. Moving Hans from JSR 296 to JavaFX has almost stopped the appframework implementation.

I miss statements about Swing, which is where I had hoped to work for the next years or decade. Where’s Sun’s focus for the next years? What effort will be put into Swing? I’m worried that a word like “abandoned” appears when talking about Swing. (What happens if someone tells you “Don’t think about a pink elefant!”?)

Anyway, thanks for speaking up.