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JavaFX Script To Live On At Project Visage

[Update Tue Oct 5 20:18:09 CDT 2010] I updated the blogs list.

I did not attend this year's Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne conference. However, being a coauthor of a JavaFX book, naturally I'm interested in any JavaFX news from the conference.

The first hint of of something unusual happening comes from twitter. Someone simply twitted "JavaFX Script is dead." (I can't find the link I saw now, but this one is close enough.) Then a thread on the javaposse Google group discussing the same. Then the blogs:

For those who are not paying attention to JavaFX, the change is sweeping: Oracle will abandon JavaFX Script the language, putting on hold the JavaFX Mobile initiatives, and bring the graphics stack underneath JavaFX 1.x back into Java. Such a reappropriated JavaFX 2.0 stack will be previewed next year and be available some time later.

The selling point of the new JavaFX 2.0 is that a Java API can then be used from any JVM languages including JRuby, Clojure, Scala, and Groovy. And I guess that made everyone happy.

Not me!

I firmly believe JavaFX Script is an unfair victim of a failed strategy that Sun pursued near the end of its life to get JavaFX Mobile adopted. The cause of that failure has everything to do with the dynamics of the businesses of the mobile industry and probably have little to do with JavaFX Script the language.

But that's life.

I'm very grateful to Stephen Chin for taking the initiative to establish a new home for the GPLed JavaFX Script language compiler at http://visage-lang.org/. Unlike JavaFX Script in JavaFX 1.x, which is the only language for the platform, Visage will have to compete with the other popular JVM languages for the honor of the language of choice of writing JavaFX 2.0 GUIs. I believe it has a very good chance of achieving it.

Since the world won't see JavaFX 2.0 for a while, we'll just have to wait.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on October 1, 2010 8:02:24 AM CDT #


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Re: JavaFX Script To Live On At Project Visage

Comment from William on October 2, 2010 11:40:33 AM CDT #
Sir Weiqi, I agree with you in all your lines. That's life...
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Re: JavaFX Script To Live On At Project Visage

Comment from Hildeberto Mendonça on October 3, 2010 2:53:43 AM CDT #
The reason why JavaFX failed has absolutely nothing to do with mobile. Even JavaFX for desktop was not adopted AT ALL. I was tired to see little demos on-line, nothing really professional, far behind its competitors. JavaFX never got mature enough to the real world. Any Javascript library renders more widgets than JavaFX. All Swing developers were frustrated for not being able to improve their existing applications. We were forced to develop something from scratch in order to use JavaFX and even those who took the risk to chose this technology were scared with the possibility of not finding a really needed feature to move forward in their software projects.
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Re: JavaFX Script To Live On At Project Visage

Comment from Jean Paul Lopes on October 4, 2010 7:16:25 AM CDT #
That´s life ! But JavaFX Script shows to all Java programers a new pardigm, Design. The DSL scructure seens like greek for many programers (except greeks programers :o) ). I´d love JavaFX simplicity and direct implementation, easy (but not complete) integration to Java Classes and power to reder excelent interfaces. There was many problems with the language like small numeber of components, documentation and solid examples, but the same thing occours with others languages in the begining. Programing in JavaFX Script is more easier, faster and funny than Java. I will support Visage util I can. Regards from Brazil,

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