First Night With JavaFX and Netbeans - First Impression, Some Smoke 📎
JavaFX preview is just few days young. I just installed it and developed some simple applications to get a feeling, how it works. First impressions:
- The download was surprisingly smooth. No strange questions or license agreements. Just 2 clicks.
- The installation was even easier. The Java FX tooling was integrated in my existing Netbeans 6.1 installation. I had only to reboot Netbeans. There were no problems. (second surprise). I expected, however, fresh installation with some cool artwork, an existing Netbeans was extended instead.
- Java FX Tooling comes with lot of examples. I tried some (bounce, applets etc.), there were no problems at all.
- Applets can be started in applet runner or browser - it just worked. You can choose between JavaScript or JNLP integration. Support for "draggable" applets is available as well. It didn't worked in my case - probably my JDK 1.6u10 plugin is too old.
- Code completion is fast and works as expected.
- Preview works functionality worked in all cases.
- The compilation process is well integrated in the build lifecycle.
- There is a non-visual drag and drop support available (similar to the non-visual JSP stuff). It is useful. You can just drag transformations, animations, Swing components etc. directly to your class.
- Debugger works as expected, breakpoints etc. just work as in the Java case. Very useful to understand the existing code (in my case the bounce example).
- The tooling is similar to the "old" Netbeans 6.0 based. However it is much faster and more stable.