If you have been fol­lowing JavaFX, there are plenty of voices pre­dicting the death (here and here) of JavaFX as well as some voices pre­dicting its bright (and enterprise-​​ready) fu­ture. For now, I be­long to the latter set of voices. And, for me and the com­pany I work for (Exadel), it’s not just a matter of opinion, but a matter of com­mit­ment through building better tooling sup­port.

Let’s look at tooling for JavaFX. Naturally, NetBeans does come with JavaFX sup­port. The sup­port is de­cent, and there is also work being done on a vi­sual de­signer for JavaFX. On the Eclipse side, how­ever, there is very little talk or men­tion of JavaFX tooling.

My com­pany has been de­vel­oping a JavaFX plug-​​in Eclipse since last year. Lately we have picked up the pace. First, the plug-​​is now open source at ex​adel​.org. There is now a public JIRA project for issue tracking, a forum, and nightly builds — all nice in­te­grated to­gether. We have started re­leasing more fre­quently (about every two weeks) with bug fixes and a few extra fea­tures. We are slowly adding new fea­tures, but there is still a lot of work. (Let us know what fea­tures you’d like to see in the plug-in’s forum.)

Now let’s run through the ex­isting fea­tures in the plug-​​in that help you de­velop JavaFX applications.

Installing

Installing the plug-​​in is very simple. You can down­load the plug-​​in lo­cally and point Eclipse’s Install New Software wizard to in­stall from that lo­ca­tion. There is also an Eclipse up­date site. In the Install New Software window, point to this lo­ca­tion (http://​down​load​.ex​adel​.org/​j​a​v​a​f​x​_​p​l​u​g​i​n​/​u​p​d​a​t​e​s​/​s​t​a​b​le/) and you will have the plug-​​in in­stalled in under a minute.

The plug-​​in works with Eclipse 3.4.2 and 3.5 on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

New Project Creation

Once the plug-​​in is in­stalled and the JavaFX per­spec­tive is se­lected, there is a wizard to create a new JavaFX project (File/​New/​JavaFX Project). You will be asked to set the JavaFX SDK. Later, if you need to change the JavaFX SDK entry, you can al­ways do it via Window/​Preferences/​JavaFX/​Installed JavaFX Runtimes.

JavaFX Script Wizard Creator

Once the project is ready, the JavaFX script wizard will help you create your first script by se­lecting New/​JavaFX Script. You will have the op­tion to create a com­pletely empty file or use a number of script gen­er­ator op­tions shown below:

Stage Generation:

Generating Shapes:

Two more op­tions are avail­able CustomNode and Scene. In these cases, a new JavaFX file will be cre­ated ei­ther with ini­tial CustomNode or with Scene code.

Projects Based on JavaFX SDK Examples

If you want to see some ready to run ex­am­ples, then you can create a new JavaFX project based on one of the avail­able JavaFX SDK sam­ples. Select File/New/Examples…/JavaFX Examples/​JavaFX Examples and you will get the fol­lowing wizard:

Running the Application

Once you have cre­ated your first page or ap­pli­ca­tion, it’s time to run it. The plug-​​in makes it very easy to launch what you have cre­ated. Just right-​​click the file and se­lect Run As. You will get three op­tions: JavaFX Application, JavaFX Application (Applet), and JavaFX Application (Web Start)

Outline View

Selecting any node in the out­line, will se­lect it in the JavaFX script ed­itor:

JavaFX Script Editor

Code Assist

When in the JavaFX Script ed­itor, hit Ctrl-​​Space to get code as­sist based on your lo­ca­tion in the code.

Code Formatting

JavaFX Script has JSON-​​like format. Formatting the code will make it sim­pler to un­der­stand. To format the code, high­light the sec­tion (or the en­tire page) and se­lect Format.

Before for­mat­ting:

After for­mat­ting:

Automatic Bracket Closing

Whenever you type an opening { or [ bracket, the ap­pro­priate closing bracket will be in­serted automatically.

Bracket Matching Indicator

Whenever you put the mouse cursor after a bracket, the closing matching bracket will be high­lighed in yellow to help you see where the cur­rent block ends.

Resources

Exadel JavaFX plug-​​in home: http://​ex​adel​.org/​j​a​v​a​f​x​p​l​u​gin
Forum: http://​ex​adel​.org/​f​o​r​u​m​/​j​a​v​a​f​x​p​l​u​gin
User guide: http://​down​load​.ex​adel​.org/​j​a​v​a​f​x​_​p​l​u​g​i​n​/​d​o​c​s​/​g​u​i​de/

Going Forward

We think that JavaFX is a great tech­nology. It’s a great lan­guage for building user in­ter­faces, and it has a lot of po­ten­tial, which can be re­al­ized if Oracle would in­vest money in it.

In my opinion, for making JavaFX even greater, one of the most im­por­tant things Oracle can do is make de­ploy­ment and launching of JavaFX ap­pli­ca­tions very very simple. It has to be fast, trans­parent to the end user, with no scary di­alog win­dows ap­pearing. If they need an ex­ample of a better way, they can al­ways look at Flash application.

As for the plug-​​in, it’s ob­vi­ously just a be­gin­ning. We would love to hear from you as we add more features.

Update

Since this ar­ticle was orig­i­nally pub­lished, the Exadel JavaFX Plug-​​in for Eclipse has now now come out in a new ver­sion 1.3 for down­loading or up­dating. This ver­sion in­cludes sup­port for JavaFX 1.3.

Originally pub­lished on DZone: Your Personal Tech Universe/​Javalobby. Reprinted with permission.

Tags: article, dZone, Eclipse, Exadel JavaFX Plug-In for Eclipse, JavaFX, RIA