Welcome to the first in hopefully a series of pieces on JavaFX Script. In future posts, I hope to actually do some coding and investigations on my own, but for now, I'm just going to link to the interesting work that others are doing.

In particular, the JavaFX folks now have a first-cut at a compiler for JavaFX Script.  One of the things holding back the language from being ready for prime time is that it was initially interpreted only, which was a bottleneck to good execution performance in general. With the advent of the compiler, now open-sourced and being developed in the community, the language should perform much better and be closer to an environment we could all use for desktop application development. Of course, this will just shift the performance bottleneck elsewhere, which is why a full-on Direct3D-accelerated Java2D pipeline is in the plans for the Consumer JRE release.

There is also a NetBeans plugin that offers enhanced capabilities for editing JavaFX Script programs; a handy thing for anyone doing serious hacking with the language.

Finally, there are always more cool Java FX Script demos, like the Casual IM client. Playing around with the demos is one of the best ways to see how everything works. I would encourage you to check out the JavaFXPad demo in particular; it's an interactive demo that shows the results of your changes as you type them into the code window. The demo is also available in the NetBeans plugin for JavaFX, as of the NetBeans 6 M9 build.

That's it for now. Hopefully I'll get some time soon to dive in and do some hacking with the language and see how filthy I can get.

(For background on JavaFX Script, check out the openjfx project site. There are lots of demos to play with that help describe what the project, language, and concept are all about.)