JavaFX Presentation at JavaOne

The transformation of F3 into JavaFX continues. I had signed up for the Form Follows Function (F3) session, but F3 was renamed JavaFX yesterday and now even the session title has been renamed: JavaFX Script. Chris Oliver is getting ready to make his presentation. The program on the projector says "JavaFX PDF Reader." So maybe he is going to use a JavaFX app to show the slides for the presentation. One can imagine a PowerPoint -> PDF -> JavaFX workflow here. If this is the case, it's a nice touch since it's a classic "eating your own dog food" tactic. Let's see…

The JFX (as Chris Oliver started calling it) presentation was very cool. Chris talked about his motivation for JFX. The first was that developers tended to be the limiting reagent in UI development, i.e. they took much more time than designers did. Web UIs were often used for prototyping for this very reason. Java/Swing UIs are often stereotyped as being very ugly, quite unlike Flash based apps. The last (and maybe most important) factor was that event listeners became a huge mess in UI code.

To tackle the first set of problems, JFX leverages Java 2D instead of Swing. The constructs used by designers have analogies in Java 2D, not in Swing. JFX brings a lot of the techniques of Swing to Java 2D. It uses a declarative syntax for this and allows for composition a la Swing, but Java 2D powers the building block components of JFX. This is very cool. The idea here is that anything you can do with Flash (and Silverlight!) can be done with Java 2D, and now can be easily done with JFX.

The next, and maybe more crucial aspect, was the elimination of event listeners in JFX. JFX uses a bidirectional update system that makes everything seamless to the developer. If the server updates a component it is re-rendered automagically. If a user invokes an action, the server side state is synchronized effortlessly. This was pretty impressive. As somebody who has designed a UI language (at Ludi Labs) I was especially impressed. We tackled the same problem there by auto-generating the event listeners essentially. I'm curious if this is what JFX is doing. Chris mentioned his inspiration came from functional programming, so maybe he came up with a more elegant approach.

Finally, among the demos was indeed the PDF reader I mentioned at the beginning of the post. Indeed all the slides were being displayed using the JFX PDF viewer. It was a very slick PDF viewer, with nice animations, zoom, page previews, etc. Chris got a great reaction when "revealed" that his PDF reader was a JFX application.

So what do I conclude from all this? Glad you asked. JFX has a design that really sets it apart from anything out there. There's a lot more going on here than just a Flex clone. That definitely is part of it, as Chris was quick to admit. Flex looks nice. Nice looking apps is only part of the equation. Improving UI development is a bigger puzzle to solve. JFX looks like it can deliver. It just needs the tooling for the designers to go along with it. More on that later.

One final observation. It really seemed like Chris Oliver was as surprised as anyone that F3 became JavaFX and thus the "big announcement" of JavaOne. Sun seems to be pushing JFX using the mobility angle (including all this nonsense about Blue-Ray devices.) There was no mention of that by Chris.