Today I got an opportunity to take part in a Sun’s JavaFX training session at our Faculty. This session was conducted by Mr. Feisal Ahmad from Singapore. He was currently a Senior Technology Consultant in Sun Learning Services at Sun Microsystems. Along with him some senior officials from Sun Microsystems visited our Faculty, this training session was part of their programme.
There was a session introducing the Sun Microsystems‘s new technology that enables all the Java developers (web component, standalone application and mobile application) to use a common technology for creating rich applications using a common user interface called JavaFX . For me it felt like they have combined the features of Java Swing, MIDP, JSP, JSF, etc for creating rich GUIs and JavaScript or VRML kind of syntax for implementing the properties and controls for these components sticking to Java‘s basic syntax.
During the morning session Feisal talk to us about the features and capabilities of JavaFX and how it can be used to make the life easy for developers in creating eye catching GUI applications which can be easily ported to run on any platform(Web, Mobile or Standalone). This further strengthen their saying ‘write once and run anywhere‘ making it applicable for all the hardware platforms. It was a technology that gives the flexibility to the programmer to create the GUI with very small set of lines of codes when comparing to earlier technologies that took hundred lines of code. It provide plugins support for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for creating the necessary designs and for developers this technology is freely available for download as a plugin for NetBeans. For beginners they have provided a nice set of tutorials and other resources covering its basics and for getting our hands dirty. Next he extended his discussion toward Java’s enterprise technologies and the important aspects (about the importance of the Functional requirements as well as the Non-functional requirements) that we should considered when building enterprise level world applications. He explained about these aspects and how it can be handled using J2EE platform.
The afternoon session was dedicated give us a hands on experience about the JavaFX technology. During this session I learned how to make use of JavaFX to build a small image sideshow incorporating rich features like tweening, scaling, rotating, adding reflections, etc… into it and later we looked at how to incorporate a media player into a Java application having features that we are currently experiencing with web based Flash video players. At the end of the session Feisal asked questions based on the stuff he spoke to us during the morning session and gave gifts for those who gave correct answers and I was fortunate to win a laptop bag and a T-shirt having the Sun logo embedded. 🙂
I would like to give my special thanks to Mr. Feisal Ahmad of Sun Microsystems for his wonderful effort and spending his entire day with us sharing his knowledge and experiences, also I would like to thank my friend Ransara for coordinating this event in collaboration with NetAssists International.
tHOUGHTS & iDEAS 