JavaFX 1.3 Development

Question

hi any1,
I am currently doing a business application, and for the UI portion, well i decided long ago to use JavaFX. Now i have to start the coding, however JavaFX 1.3 release date is elusive.
As of now, If i use JavaFX 1.2 to start the development, i am concern that i may be doing more unnecessary work. JavaFX 1.3 is supposedly better, in terms of performance and UI controls.
Any1 share my concern here?
Cheers.

Answer 1

I've made an installation wizard with the composer and it was a natural process. I had some trouble though :
- when the number of states and actions gets bigger, NetBeans becomes very slow and it's a pain to edit the class' code.
- As said using FXZ was buggy, I had to remove them from my installer. Additionnaly to the bug when you put the FXZ on the form (drag and drop may not work or the FDZ may appear blank and not at the proper coordinates), if I closed my form in NetBeans and reopen it, the design screen showed nothing so I could not edit my form anymore. In the mean time I use PNGs.
- I do not know how I did it but I had succeeded into creating some corrupted states (the wizard would freeze when switching to those states), so I had to delete some and recreate them.
- if the (hidden) FXC file associated to your form gets corrupted or manually modified, your form is dead; you have to start everything over.
The other things I do not like are :
- it creates forms based based around Scene which is good for creating a wizard or a small desktop/mobile app. In future version I want to be able to create a form based around Panel instead. This would make re-usability in existing programs/UIs much easier. Currently I have to cheat by doing something like that each time I want to reuse a form :
def form =...
def nodes:Node[] = form.getDesignRoots();
for (node in nodes) {
  delete node from (node.parent as Group).content;
def formPanel:Panel = Panel {
  content: nodes
}I do not like this kind of hacks.
- there is a timeline in the form even if you have only 1 state.
- handling of geometric shapes need to be improved.
- there needs to be improvements in control alignement features.
- there need to be improvement with font rendering. I found out that my right alignement for labels were all bad because the font in the composer was not the same than the font on screen (coding and execution were both done on the same Windows machine). In the mean time I just do left alignement which seems to be Ok.
- and of course being able to use JFXtras, Swing (and not juste the prewrapped ones), custom control...
Edited by: bouye on Apr 15, 2010 1:06 PM