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Java News Brief (JNB): Experiments With JavaFX Script

This month's OCI Java News Brief (JNB) is online now. Since I last reported on JNB in September about Mark's WAX article, let me briefly mention the JNBs that were published since:

The December article is written by yours truly. It grew out of an OCI Java lunch about JavaFX in July of this year, a couple of days before the JavaFX Preview SDK release. (Talking about OCI's Java lunchs, please check out the video of this month's Java lunch—Eric Burke's Android presentation on YouTube.) I also signed up to write a JNB article about JavaFX for December, not knowing that JavaFX Desktop SDK 1.0 will be released on Devember 4, a few days after the article goes online.

The article is a bit long. That's because I started early, and I wanted to cover the language to the extent that after reading the article, you can go on reading JavaFX source files without too many language related issues.

I wrote the article in the last three weekends before Thanksgiving, plus the evenings in between. The three most enjoyable aspects of the writing process are:

  1. The openjfx-compiler Open Source project, where when you ask a question, the JavaFX compiler team members, including Brian Goetz, Per Bothner, Robert Field, will answer your question.
  2. The AntlrWorks IDE for ANTLR grammars with its syntax diagram display. The developers of the JavaFX ANTLR grammar may have spent days agonizing over the language design details. With AntlrWorks I can browse the whole thing in minutes.
  3. The MarkMail.org mailing list archive and search tool. It uses the MarkLogic Server XQuery technology. And its web UI is really easy to use. The openjfx-compiler's mailing lists are all available at http://openjfx.markmail.org.

So if you are at all curious about this new JavaFX Script language, give the article a try. It's a charming little language that can do lots of cute things.

And of course, go get the 1.0 release on December 4 from javafx.com.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on December 3, 2008 7:11:10 AM CST #


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Re: Java News Brief (JNB): Experiments With JavaFX Script

Comment from Dave Ray on December 3, 2008 8:39:46 AM CST #
Great article. It's a really succinct description of the language. I feel like I could start coding right away. I haven't been keeping up with JavaFX up to this point, but I think I might give it a try tomorrow. It's a little thing, but I think the postInit block is really cool. I've always wished that other languages had something like that.

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