Today Sun oficially released JavaFX 1.0. I was really looking forward for this release but I`m really shocked how bad it actually is. This is purely from a user point of view because i haven`t done any development so far.
One of the biggest problems of Java has always been the install experience so I thought they would do it perfect this time but not so. I think I have never experienced a worse install experience as for the new JavaFX. I went to the sample page http://javafx.com/samples/ and selected one of the samples. First there was nothing happening just a blank screen, then machine freeze for about half a minute then nothing. Went back selected a different example – machine freeze and after some minutes i finally got a window telling me i need to install something and that it`s untrusted content WTF. Ok installed JavaFX and thought now it should be all fine. Select a sample again and now they finally load. It takes unbelievable long to load. I always thought the Flex SDK is big but if this is just unbelievable. Ok when the app finally, after some screen flicking loads it`s unbelievable unresponsive. I really expected JavaFX to be blazing fast compared to Flash Player but it`s just sluggish and feels like good old applets.  After that bad experience I wanted to finally see something cool and checked out the more promising examples. First video playback. What`s cool about this is that it can handle flv files! Really nice! But it`s slow. The video playback stutters extremely on my machine (New MacBook Pro). Went on to the next killer feature example. Dragging an mp3 player from the website to the desktop. Well I couldn`t figure out how to do it Tried to grab and drag every pixel but it just did nothing
The other strange thing is that everytime you scroll a page with an JavaFX applet the applet just disappears.
Seems like they have to disable the applets while scrolling for performance or something but this is just insane.

This really looks like a JFX flame post but it`s all just out of disappointment. I really had high expectations but now they are all gone. I think if you missed the RIA train like SUN did and then take so long for the release you have to make it perfect. Well this is not the perfect release they would have needed IMO.
I really really wanted SUN to succeed with JFX because to me it seemed the only possible alternative to the Flash Platform but seems like I just have to rely on Adobe for a long time (which is not too bad ;-)).

BTW seeing the JavaFX logo and the FlexBuilder logo on my desktop side by side I really hope SUN gets sued for this. It`s just shameless and maybe hints at how innovative they are (not).