And within 24 hours, Sun has released some workflow tooling for JavaFX 1.2.

I really think this rocks too.
It is tackling the workflow for designer and developer in a completely different way to what Adobe is with Flash Catalyst.

Adobe wants designers to:

1. Design in Photoshop/Illustrator
2. Load into Flash Catalyst
3. Tweak, add some behaviours etc
4. Load into Flash Builder (or use SDK) and code up the rest

To me this seems like adding in another application just to make life harder!
(and I dont really get where Flash IDE is going to fit in with this yet either).

Sun however has it much more straight-forward:

1. Design in Photoshop/Illustrator (amongst others)
2. Load into NetBeans (or use SDK) and code it up.

Sun have done a superb job with this suite of plugins.

However, what I find lacking is the ability to create a skin for a built-in control (such as for javafx.scene.control.Button). This will probably come in a future release and is certainly not essential as its fairly straight-forward now to create an entire GUI (or parts thereof) in Photoshop and code up the logic from the exported output.

This workflow also suits our particular company way better than Adobe’s workflow offering and I suspect we are not alone. We have great designers who spend every second of their day in Photoshop or Illustrator, and great programmers who spend their day in a text editor!

I really cant stress how happy we all are here and how much we are looking forward to using this new technology in production. We are writing applications for web, desktop and mobile that JavaFX can really help bridge the gap.

More soon.

Hot on the heels of Flash Builder 4 and Flex SDK 4, the much anticipated update to JavaFX is now with us. And WOW, this is just what I was hoping for and more.

OK, the top must-haves are now here:

• More skin-able and CSS style-able controls
• More layout classes

Without these, creating any real-world JavaFX app is just too darn cumbersome.
These additions should make it much much quicker and easier to create JavaFX apps.

A big change/addition I wasn’t expecting is the addition of some charting controls, including Area, Bar, Bubble, Line, Pie, Scatter, and X/Y. We seem to be doing more and more charting in applications at the moment so these will probably come in handy.

Another big addition is that of a load of effects classes. These will hopefully add some nice polish to our apps.

There are many changes in this release, more details of which can be found:
http://javafx.com/docs/articles/javafx1-2.jsp
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javafx/v1_2_newlayouts/

We will now be able to start creating some useful apps with JavaFX so expect more posts very soon!