I sat down with Jan Stafford of Tech Target at JavaOne in September and discussed our experiences with beginning to migrate to JavaFX from Swing while continuing to use the NetBeans Rich Client Platform (RCP) as the foundation for our application.

I discuss some of the pros of using JavaFX and the NetBeans RCP, such as having the ability to develop very polished looking components using effects such as drop shadows, reflections, and gradients  which may have been do-able in Swing, but were extremely painful and time consuming.  These effects however are baked into the JavaFX framework.

The largest negative at this point has been the learning curve with getting up to speed on Cascading Style Sheets.  Since much of the look and feel of the UI can be applied via CSS, it took a bit of work to learn how to use the style sheets to properly style the UI components.  However, the benefit to using CSS is that the work can be given to a UX/UI developer rather than a Java developer, thus truly decoupling the UI development from the business logic development.

A link to the interview on Tech Target’s website is below.

Interview with Tech Target: JavaFX beats Swing: Changing RIA development platform

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