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).
We’ve done some development for it. In our experience, it performs pretty awfully on a Mac unless it’s really really really optimized, but it works MUCH better on a PC. If you have one available, try it out on Windows and see what you think.
I expect them to optimize for Mac later. With 90% of the market on PC, it just wasn’t their biggest concern for this first release.
I just checked the sample page but I cant seem to find any to view. Or do you have to download the SDK to view samples?
@William: Seems the whole site is down and they just show some old links. Seems something really went wrong.
The draggable MP3 player and some other examples state that they require Java SE 6 Update 10. According to http://www.javatester.org/version.html, my Leopard Mac with all software updates installed has Java 1.5.0_16 which I assume correlates to Java SE 5 Update 16. (Never understood the inane Java version numbering). So that’s probably why that one isn’t working for you too. Not sure if this major Java version lag is the fault of Apple or Sun, or both, but it seems to be the way things go on OS X.
I agree with the performance assessments here, but I didn’t notice quite the install experience problems you mentioned. I got an applet trust dialog, followed by a prompt to install JavaFX runtime, followed within 10 seconds or so by another applet trust dialog, and then the first example started working. That’s about 2 dialogs too many, but otherwise it was fairly quick and painless. (I am using Safari 3.2.1)
I went ahead and DL’d and installed (1:12). The “Fastest” way to get up & running is a 62MB DL. The installer isn’t as painful as you describes, Benjamin (but it did take a while on my Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 4 GB RAM) (1:18). While waiting I went ahead and signed up for Sun Online Account. Once installed I checked out the “Displayshelf” sample (1:27). Animation is choppy and poor in my opinion. Then went to checkout “Effects Playground” and launched it in “Java Web Start” browser view. Had to double & triple click on stuff to make things happen, and when it finally did, it was slow and unresponsive. Horizontal Scroll bar lags to my mouse, radial dials are annoyingly broken.
When I went to launch task manager to see how much RAM was being used, firefox crashed (1:37)!
I don’t think I’ll be digging into JavaFX anytime soon. Not until I see some significant improvements here.
I’ve got 4G of RAM here, on an intel core duo. I’m sad. I was hoping to see some Flex Competition here.
Wait for a long time,but the result is no satisfy enough which we expected for.
But I think Sun will work hard catch to flex/silverlight.
That’s pretty disapointing. I can remember reading an article saying that javaFX would allow you to achieve the same result as using technolobies like flash or flex, but with have the develoment time…
seems like it’s to ittle to late…
I met the similar issues too. Each time when I opened an applet page on javafx.com, the page will stop responding to any mouse wheel event for a while! It\\\’s really disappointing. I checked the first example \\"interesting gallery\\" carefully, and find it\\\’s very sluggish to mouse click event.
Why Sun always provides immature products.
The video player on rotating cube always freezes my browser (firefox).