This article is also posted on JavaLobby.com

This is a guest post by Anton Polyakov. Anton is Senior Developer at Exadel, he describes our experience building a JavaFX front end for a Seam booking application.

JavaFX is new tool set for developing and delivering Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. JavaFX 1.0 was released in December 2008, and JavaFX 1.2 was released in June 2009. As these new releases have rolled out, the JavaFX community has been growing fast. This growth has produced a large selection of resources, articles, blog posts, books, and extension projects.

Over this time, while JavaFX has been used extensively to provide “richness” in applications, it has been mostly “missing in action” for enterprise-level Web applications that would involve greater integration of JavaFX with the server side of the application. Remember, a Rich Internet Application is delivered from a server to the the client, but, more importantly, it continues to communicate with the server. The UI runs on the client while the application logic runs on the server.

We believe that for JavaFX to continue growing and compete against Flex and Silverlight, it should be acceptable by the enterprise for use in applications that take full advantage of both sides of Rich Internet Applications (Rich Enterprise Applications). Adobe and its community has done an excellent job demonstrating that Flex can be used to build real-world enterprise applications. The same needs to happen for JavaFX.