JavaOne 2009: RIA development with JavaFX

A big “Hello” from JavaOne 2009 ! Me and three other colleagues are currently attending the number one Java conference in beautiful San Francisco along with hundreds of other top notch developers, architects and companies of the Java world (it’s been the first time for me seeing James Gosling tossing shirts into the audience live – I was not lucky enough to catch one though)

One of my favourite topics this year is the current JavaFX development (they just released JavaFX 1.2). I’ve been stuck with JSPs for ages, looking for a new, innovative and fancy way to present the view layer without loosing the power of Java. JavaFX has been around for almost two years now (first announced in May 2007, 1.0 released December 2008), becoming a stable and production ready framework by now.

I attended sessions that presented the integration of frameworks such as Spring or JBoss Seam with JavaFX (@see Flamingo) to become a real option for enterprise applications or the possibility to export your Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator files directly to a JavaFX resource bundle (a .jfz archive), with the programmer being able to simply access (and manipulate) the layers of the file by using a specific naming convention (jfx:layerid) – this way you can give a spec to a design team, ending up with a view artefact ready to be used with your application.

What I like as well is the possibility to deploy your app to different platforms, such as the web, desktop or even mobile devices. It will also possible to directly deploy applications to the brand new Java Store (which was just launched during the conference as a closed beta – public beta should be available later this summer).

Another thing that’s changed is the support of JavaFX for the eclipse IDE, which is the one I work with on a daily basis. Netbeans is still the best supported IDE, but there is an official eclipse plugin available at javafx.com as well as companies out there developing tools for eclipse like exadel ‘s JavaFX Studio . Thanks to those tools I build my first JavaFX “application” (just a fancy text in a gradient circle) within minutes.

Next steps will be trying to build a real application rather than just another “Hey, it is an animated thing build on JavaFX” demo. If you want to get your fingers dirty, try the excellent tutorials provided at javafx.com

Okay, gotta go, I am already late for my next session!