XML: October 2011 Archives

Sun Microsystems produced the first go-round of JavaFX late in 2008, it aimed to build a new declarative language for describing the front-end UI of an app. What developers needed at that time was a simpler, programmatic way to approach the contents of UIs. Oracle has remade Sun's JavaFX distributed apps platform into a version 2.0 with fundamental differences. The most prominent addition is a new Oracle language called FXML, different from the JavaFX Script in its handling of UI elements, but whose distinctions against XAML seem almost artificial. One of the advantages of FXML is that it is based on XML and is familiar to most developers, especially Web developers and developers using other RIA platforms. Another is that FXML is not a compiled language; you do not need to recompile the code to see the changes you make. A third advantage is that FXML makes it easier to see the structure of your application's scene graph. In version 2.0, Oracle has cast out the declarative-like portion of JavaFX Script (which lives on in an open source project called Visage), replacing it with FXML and adapting the remaining elements of JavaFX to load that FXML as separate resources. http://www.oracle.com/