With Java 7 having been released  back in July and the road map for Java 8 also  pretty familiar, Java FX 2.0 seems to be the star of this week's Java One conference with no fewer than 50 sessions on it.

Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group, was among the speakers at the JavaOne 2011 conference - and was in the tricky position of having little in the way of new announcements. With regard to Java 7 he was able to tell delegates that as of last week, when Eclipse version 3.7.1 was released, Java 7 is supported by all three of its major IDEs.

Looking forward to Java 8 he outlined the "revolutionary" features that go beyond the "evolutionary" ones of Java 7, discussing Project Jigsaw, a Java-native module system to simplify the construction, packaging, and deployment of applications and Project Lambda, which will bring closures to the Java programming language. He also announced Project Nashorn, Oracle's JavaScript re-implementation on JVM.  

The main news of the morning was that Java FX 2.0 GA is available for download.

Java FX 2.0 was announced at last year's JavaOne and its General Availability release was officially announced by Richard Bair, Chief Architect, Client Java Platform. He listed Java FX key features as:

• Cross Platform
• Leverage Java
• Advanced Tooling
• Developer Productivity
• Amazing User Interfaces

emphasizing that the most important aspect of any UI technology are good visual development tools.

An early build of JavaFX Scene Builder, a WYSIWYG GUI design tool that lets you drag and drop GUI components from a palette onto a scene, was available to delegates before being available in a closed beta. The tool generates files in FXML format that can be used within a project in any IDE such as NetBeans or Eclipse and can be used to create GUI for desktop applications and applets that run in a browser.

The other news for JavaFX is that Oracle announced its intention to open source the JavaFX platform as a new project under OpenJDK. Oracle intends to initially contribute the JavaFX UI controls and related libraries; other JavaFX components will follow in multiple phases.The source code for JavaFX will be released under the GPL v2 with Classpath license, similar to other projects in OpenJDK. The Oracle JavaFX runtime and SDK will continue to be released under the Java Binary Code License.

The announcements were followed up with a series of demos of the capabilities of Java FX in which Jasper Potts covered animated 2D and 3D, audio EQ mapping and concluded with a navigable 3D virtual room in which Duke is controlled by a Kinect. Thanks to Kazuchikatube who was in the audience and posted the video below we can all share in the fun:

Java FX 2.0 seems set to dominate the conference with no fewer than 50 sessions on it.

Related articles:

JavaFX 2.0 released in beta

Java 7 Release Candidate ships

JCP approves Java 7 and 8 road maps

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