JavaFX 1.2 brings more UI controls
June 2, 2009
JavaFX 1.2 arrived silently last night in order to coincide with the opening of JavaOne 2009. I’m happy to see many more UI controls included in this latest release of JavaFX, most notably ScrollBar, which is so painful to re-implement yourself.
Here’s a look at some of the new controls based on a Sun web-start app I found here (run it):
Here’s the full list of new UI controls:
- Button
- Label
- CheckBox
- ToggleButton
- RadioButton
- Hyperlink
- ProgressBar
- ProgressIndicator
- Slider
- ScrollBar
- ListView
- TextBox
I wasn’t expecting the controls to have a platform neutral look, though I think this was a good idea (similar to how Adobe Flex controls have an platform agnostic look).
Check out the full JavaFX 1.2 API — note how much fuller it is than in JavaFX 1.1.
I’m interested in hearing you’re thoughts on JavaFX 1.2, specifically about the new UI controls.
Exploding Pixels 
June 3, 2009 at 12:18 am
Looks pretty in ubuntu 9.04, we need really a official version of javafx foir linux, I have some rich applications in swing, and I have a lot of ideas to improve with javafx.. =)
June 3, 2009 at 3:14 am
ListView is more like a listbox, and quite immature. The events are a little bit anemic, for instance, you can’t implement onHover.
June 3, 2009 at 7:22 am
Well, at least it looks like, Sun is getting more reasonable on establishing wider use of JavaFX. Maybe by the time there is a 2.0, it could be a real option for desktop applications.
S.
June 3, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I must say it looks quite nice, could be a lot less fancy though, but that is just looks. It is great to see that the tab-button-navigation works.
The only bad thing is the fact that it chokes 60-70 % of my MacBook Pro CPU….
June 3, 2009 at 1:52 pm
I hadn’t check the performance of the controls, but I should do that.
June 3, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I don’t understand how I can turn this into something people will buy. JavaFX is like a slow Swing clone created by college students. Vmware made something similar I think and nobody cared.
“JavaFX is replacing AJAX” says the top dog at Sun.. unbelievable..
I’m so horrified by JavaFX that I have started reading Cocoa documentation and writing C++.
June 4, 2009 at 9:46 pm
@maxwell: There IS an official version of JavaFX for Linux – JavaFX version 1.2. Get it from http://javafx.com
Unfortunately it does not seem to work flawlessly on 64-bit Linux… (Webstart apps with JavaFX don’t work and also the video codecs do not seem to work properly on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04).
June 9, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I’m stoked by the little things: like the “undefined” checkbox state. We’ve been trying to come up with an elegant way to introduce that to JCheckBoxes for a while. Unfortunately JavaFX is still a long way off for us, but it looks like it’d be fun to explore. (Maybe by the time we’re ready to work with it it will be a little more stable/tested, too…)
June 9, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Hey Jeremy,
Yeah, it looks like their really trying hard to make the common things easy to do. I think they’ve learned a lot from Swing.
-Ken