I've been reading a lot of blogs lately that paint JavaFX in a very negative way. This is unfortunate because just about all of them have no real relevance and only leave readers with a false impression of the technology. It's truly very misleading.

I'm a fan of JavaFX, and am currently working with it on a real-world project. So far it's working as advertised, and has enabled me to put together some fancy UI components in short time. And, thanks to Jim Clarke and his contributions to the JFXtras project, I've been able to integrate JavaFX with existing Swing applications.

Overall, it's been a very positive experience, from the tools to the deployment to the performance. Sure, I wish more people were adopting the technology faster, but based on the sheer volume of blogs and articles and new public projects I've seen crop up lately, I'd say the community is growing.

So I urge you to ignore the negative tone in some of those blogs out there and give JavaFX a try. NetBeans and the JavaFX composer tool are finally in excellent form to build a production quality application quickly, and being based on Java you can maintain your existing knowledge and tools, and leverage your existing Java code seamlessly.

You can find all you need to know and use regarding JavaFX at www.javafx.com. Also, check out my articles on the topic here at Dr Dobbs, including future ones on custom control development and the aforementioned Swing integration - which by the way is one key to driving further JavaFX adoption. Are you listening Oracle?

Happy coding! -EJB