Project OpenJFX

Java counterattacks? The other day I posted that Silverlight and Flash might be going to kill Java... well Java is figting back:

JavaFX is a new family of Sun products based on Java technology and targeted at the high impact, rich content market.

JavaFX Script is a highly productive scripting language that enables content developers to create rich media and content for deployment on Java environments. JavaFX Script is a declarative, statically typed programming language. It has first-class functions, declarative syntax, list-comprehensions, and incremental dependency-based evaluation. It can make direct calls to Java APIs that are on the platform. Since JavaFX Script is statically typed, it has the same code structuring, reuse, and encapsulation features (such as packages, classes, inheritance, and separate compilation and deployment units) that make it possible to create and maintain very large programs using Java technology. See the FAQ for more information.

I am very impressed with the demos in the site, and the way less verbose way to describe interfaces (when compared with traditional Java Swing code, and I am thinking it could even be a threath for XAML & XML, some people on the net believe that XML is the poor man's parser, and that it is being overutilized to create stuff that should be implemented as an specific language... well, JavaFX is not XML... is this the start of a new trend?), I was also very exited to see how easy is to add animation to Java 2D application with this new API (everything that can be done with Flash will be possible... and maybe even more...). Now... the question are:

• Will Sun release a "UI Designers Pack" for Netbeans that will be pretty much something like Microsoft Expressions for Java?
• Could OpenJFX be adopted by projects like OpenLaszlo?
• Is using JavaScript like languages the new trend?
• Will JSON stuff become the new poor man's parser?