For all the wholly gratuitous JavaFX snarking I do around here, you’d think that the thing would have actually been out in the wild already, wouldn’t you? In fact, it’s just hit the streets today, at least in Preview SDK form. (Naturally, I can’t give you the exact link to the download page because it’s embedded in Sun’s JavaFX.com site, which is a mess of AJAX-y madness that moves from page to page without any need for your primitive “URLs.”) Anyway, let’s see what the buzz is like on JavaFX Day One! InfoQ notes a host of missing features, including advanced text rendering, animation and 3-D vector graphics, file system or network access to data, and Linux and Solaris support. (Interestingly, OS X _is_ supported, which says something about the aims for the platform and/or the shiny laptops used by the JavaFX dev team.) ZDNet notes that Sun and Adobe are going at their RIA plays in different ways: Adobe has counted on designers to be the evangelists for its RIA offerings, while Sun expects developers to push JavaFX. This makes an awful lot of sense based on the culture and orientation of the two companies. The Register notes snidely that Sun has shackled JavaFX to NetBeans, at least for the moment, which will not sit well with the millions of developers who prefer Eclipse, or anything other than NetBeans, for development purposes. Network World wonders whether Sun is already too far behind its competitors, but quotes an analyst who notes that “the Java community is very patient with stuff like this.” Ha ha, as if they’ve had a choice! If you’re tired of the endless analysis and would like to, you know, play with the code, Sun has a tutorial on building a simple JavaFX app with NetBeans. Try it out and tell us what you think! Software Development