JavaFX 1.3 – What to expect..

Updated (16 April)

To better plan my projects I’ve always been nosing around trying to figure out what to expect on future JavaFX releases.

After someone on a thread asked me to tell him what I knew about what is to come, I figured that since the list is a bit extensive and other people might be interested in knowing I’d do a post about it on my blog.

So here is what I know so far:

• New graphics stack called Prism, no longer dependent on awt/swing. Expect better performance.

(Update: You’re probably able to choose whether or not you want to use Prism )

• All bindings will be lazy (not sure how will that cope up with the rest)

(Update:The runtime will figure out what type of bind to use and always try to choose lazy over normal bind to get better performance. The scene graph has been changed to better accommodate lazy binding. On replace triggers will use normal binding by default.)

3D:

• 3D Space with 3d transforms putting 2d objects on a 3d space.
• Perspective and Parallel camera – probably the same feature that exists in Java3D
• Bounds now is on 3D

A little bit disappointed that there will be no 3d shapes, I needed that on my app. But than again there aren’t probably many people needing this.

(Updade: Just reminded that 3d shapes are done with transformed 2d shapes like triangles or squares, duuuuhhhhh! So you should probably be able to create 3D shapes yourself using the existing 2d shapes.)

Controls:

• Multi-line TextBox (TextBox is a text input field)
• Better skinning API. Added Regions
• Caspian Skin
• Password Box control
• Separator control
• ChoiceBox control. (not sure what this is, if someone knows please post a comment) Its a non-editable ComboBox
• Spacer Control (for layout purposes)
• Custom cell support on Lists
• Menus
• ToolBar
• Tree
• CSS support for charts

The biggest miss here is Table. Of course you can always rely on Swing Table

Graphics:

• Support for custom cursors
• Filling shapes with a texture

That’s all I know, also expect bug fixes and performance tuning here and there. I’m guessing It won’t take long for 1.3 to be released.

I think this release will give the so much needed boost to JavaFX: except for the table almost all standard controls, better performance, 3d capabilities and some other nice goodies.

Edit: Don’t forget that this is only what I suppose will be available on 1.3. These are not facts and somethings are probably wrong or not 100% right