JavaFX, Android, and the psychic octopus

Surely one of the biggest announcements at JavaOne 2010 was the new roadmap for JavaFX, laying out the journey towards a 2.0 release that will be radically different from what had gone before -- not so much evolution, as total revolution. While the details, when they arrived, contained a fair few surprises, the overall radical nature of the roadmap was not totally unexpected; many had suspected some kind of upheaval was on the cards. Since its inception, JavaFX had struggled to define itself within the Java community, upsetting some and bamboozling others. Even the 2.0 roadmap announcement was met with some confusion on Twitter [1][2][3], although eventually most tweeters seemed to get the message. It would seem the about-turn is a reflection of a shift in the way Oracle wants Java to approach Rich Internet Applications in future, combined with a reality check regarding the limitations of the technology for API coding. No doubt the love-it-or-hate-it feedback JFX seemed to garner from the Java community also played its part in the decision. Two points in the JavaFX 2.0 roadmap particularly caught the imagination of the Twittersphere. Firstly, the JavaFX Script language is to be discontinued as an official Oracle project, and secondly, the key language features and API (scene graph, binding, sequences, etc.) are to be re-engineered into regular Java APIs, making them accessible to languages other than JavaFX Script. I have to s...

Date: September, 24 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/javakiddy/archive/2010/09/24/javafx-android-and-psychic-octopus

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