Last week, the Eclipse plugin for JavaFX 1.2.1 was released. This is an important update since June 2009 and it is a good news to Eclipse users. Because Sun is the development force behind NetBeans, NetBeans naturally becomes the “default” IDE of JavaFX. This is why JavaFX SDK is usually bundled with NetBeans for download .

I think Eclipse and NetBeans both are excellent open source IDEs for Java developers. They provide comparable features and functions. The only sad thing is that their plug-ins are not compatible with each other. Therefore, the JavaFX plug-ins must be developed separately for Eclipse and NetBeans. I personally do not have much preference from one over the other. For people who get used to the Eclipse environment have been longing for a nice JavaFX IDE without being forced to switch to NetBeans. This newly released JavaFX plug-in not only provides the support of the latest SDK 1.2.1, but also can import NetBeans projects directly. You know this helps a lot because many sample codes are coming as a NetBeans project.

If you are a fan of Eclipse( and javaFX ), you should definitely check out this plug-in here:

http://javafx.com/docs/gettingstarted/eclipse-plugin/release-notes.jsp

Other links:

JavaFX Used in Vancouver Olympics

UK Citizenship Test for Britain Applicant
Australian Citizenship Test Practice Question

British UK Australian Citizenship test on iphone
US Citizenship Test Practise

Citizenship iPhone Apps

Today, the JavaFX 1.0 SDK is officially released. It is really exciting! The JavaFX platform opens a huge market for developers and UI designers to work together for a rich interface application(RIA). Because Java technology is already on more than 10M devices(PDA, computers, cellphones, etc), this new scripting language is expected to be widely accepted by most Java developers.

One of the most innovative features, I think, should be the eye-opening Drag-to-install trick. This is support by the JDK 1.6U10. Applets can be dragged directly onto a desktop and run in a seperate window. This bring us the simplicity of installation of internet application.

Other useful and powerful features attractive to me include Netbeans IDE, video support, production suite. I downloaded and try the IDE, it is very simple to build your first “hello world” JavaFX program.

Refer to A JavaFX Demo Game

Yesterday, the JavaFX Preview SDK is available for download. This is very exciting news. Since its debute on JavaOne 2007, many enthusiasts cheered of this preview release. The formal release is schedule to be out on Dec 2, 2008. We can’t wait to get it.

Though JavaFX is a technology based on Java, it totally changes the world of “Your Dad’s Java”. Many GUI related things can be done easily on JavaFX, such as graphic, video, audio, and anything for RIA. People are excited because JavaFX provides a very simple way to implement these elements in an RIA’s GUI.

JavaFX also links the world between art designer and computer programmer. Traditionally, these two kinds of folks find them hard to work with each other. With the birth of JavaFX, we finally have an approach to combine two things easily.

With a few lines of code, JavaFX can render sophiscated GUIs that used to be done by Java with 10 times of source code. JavaFX has many build-in features of doing animation, graphical effects that are seen photoshop.

I will download and test drive the preview SDK soon.