At this morning’s session of the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, executives of Sun Microsystems are expected to announce the near-term availability of a version of Java exclusively geared to rich Internet application (RIA) developers. Commandeering Microsoft’s leftover, unused brand name (”.NET FX”), Sun is said to have dubbed this new system “JavaFX.”
JavaFX Script is a scripting language utilizing a subset of Java concepts, mixed with some new concepts that substitute for their more object-oriented counterparts. The result is a purely procedural language that is biased toward the production of graphic objects, and the input and output of data.
JavaFX resembles JavaScript (which was originally developed outside of Sun, for Netscape) more than it does Java. As with JavaScript, you declare variables using the var keyword; and while you should declare variables, they’re not necessarily explicitly typed. In other words, the interpreter can determine for itself whether a variable whose initial value is set to 0, should not be an alphanumeric string.
As part of the suite, Sun is expected to announce a new and perhaps initially bewildering embedded language called JavaFX Script - not JavaScript, not ECMAScript (one standardized form of JavaScript), not AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript). This may be the culmination of what had been called “Project Flair,” which could perhaps be described as JavaScript if Java’s creators had created it.
Previous attempts by Sun’s marketing people to describe Flair without giving away the secret, have led to some confusion. It will be interesting to see, for instance, whether JavaFX Script is actually written in JavaScript as had earlier been suggested (which might make things a little slow) or run as a separate kernel from Java altogether, which would seem on the surface to defeat the whole point of attaching a scalable vector graphics model onto Java in the first place.
via - BetaNews
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