Tuesday, May 15, 2007

It's not yet too late for Groovy FX

Recently Sun has announce JavaFX, a new family of products based on Java technologies design to simplify and speed the creation and deployment of high-impact content for a wide range of devices. JavaFX initially is compose JavaFX Script and JavaFX Mobile, which means there are more to come. JavaFX Script was F3 which got renamed. F3 is also the same as Groovy a java scripting language. I think groovy is more mature and stable now as version 1.1 will be coming soon while JavaFX Script has not yet reach version 1. Groovy has a good books Groovy in Action and Groovy Programming.

Sun should have take a good look at groovy or talk to Guillaume Laforge. Sun says " Groovy and other languages have two specific traits which don't precisely meet these needs, namely that they are generic in nature and don't provide the appropriate abstractions necessary to optimize the UI design process and similarly are designed specifically for programmers other than content authors." James Williams has a good comment on this one.

Possibilities are:

  • groovy could be the main scripting language for JavaFX.
  • combine the capabilities for f3 and groovy swing builder.
  • make groovy swing builder as alternative to f3



3 comments:

Augusto said...

JFX is designed specifically for graphics.

Does Groovy have 2D scenegraph built into the language? Does it have language constructs for animating through ranges? Is Groovy statically typed?

Both languages are not the same, just because they're scripting languages it doesn't mean they address the same issues.

Jeremy Haile said...

Groovy is your hammer and JavaFX is the latest nail?

Don't get me wrong - I really like Groovy, but JavaFX was designed for a different purpose. It has the unique feature of providing declarative scene graphs with statically typed code. Also, its binding abilities and incrementally evaluating expressions provide powerful constructs for representing animation and manipulating interfaces.

I am excited about the potential it offers.

james_027 said...

I no groovy expert, and still learning since early february. From what I understand is JavaFx has some library like 2D scenegraph you're mentioning. Just like JavaFX script use some of the standard java api like java 2d and java swing, groovy can do that also. What I wish for is JavaFX to provide the awesome 2D scene graphs and use groovy as the scripting language to use it. Since there's a groovy swingbuilder it is possible for groovy FXbuilder