Major JavaOne Announcement: JavaFX to go Fully Open-Source by Year’s End

At this year’s JavaOne during Oracle’s Strategy Keynote speech which kicks off JavaOne, Oracle made a fairly major announcement: JavaFX is set to go fully open-source by the end of this year.

This announcement has developers thinking: will JavaFX finally be relevant?

Coincidentally, DZone has recently published a JavaFX 2.0 Refcard, which you can download here. 

JavaFX’s History at JavaOne

JavaFX has been a familiar topic at JavaOne for years, since it was announced by Sun Microsystems during the 2007 JavaOne.

In 2009, JavaFX 1.1 was released to a lukewarm reception. 1.2 attempted to fix a lot of the issues developers had with 1.1, and was released at the 2009 JavaOne. Still, many developers felt that JavaFX 1.X had a number of issues.

JavaFX had trouble being widely embraced by the Java community because it initially made you write applications with a brand new scripting language called JavaFX Script. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and took control of the project, they changed the language to Java itself, so that made a lot of developers (who still loved the concept) very happy.

In 2011, with the release of 2.0, JavaFX arrived with a bunch of new Java APIs that made JavaFX more accessible.

At last year’s JavaOne, Oracle announced that JavaFX would at some point become open-source.

This year’s announcement gave that open-source release a definite deadline: somewhere in the next two months.

Developer Preview for JavaFX  on Linux and ARM

What really sold Oracle’s announcement at this year’s Keynote was when Nandini Ramani, the Vice President of Development at Oracle, showed off JavaFX running on a Raspberry Pi.

Ramani announced that JavaFX will be available as a developer preview for use on Linux and ARM devices. This is undoubtedly a move by Oracle to create a more dedicated community around JavaFX, by getting with the times and paying attention to emerging technologies.

Download It

The developer preview can be downloaded from Java.net here. 

And if you need help getting started with it, you can download the JavaFX 2.0 Refcard here.