Chapter 1. Welcome to the future: introducing JavaFX
This chapter covers
- Reviewing the history of the internet-based application
- Asking what promise DSLs hold for UIs
- Looking at JavaFX Script examples
- Comparing JavaFX to its main rivals
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” American psychologist Abraham Maslow once observed.
Language advocacy is a popular pastime with many programmers, but what many fail to realize is that programming languages are like tools: each is good at some things and next to useless at others. Java, inspired as it was by prior art like C and Smalltalk, sports a solid general-purpose syntax that gets the job done with the minimum of fuss in the majority of cases. Unfortunately, there will always be those areas that, by their very nature, demand something a little more specialized. Graphics programming has typically been one such area.
Graphics programming used to be fun! Early personal computer software sported predominantly character-based UIs. Bitmap displays were too expensive, although some computers offered the luxury of hardware sprites. For the programmer, the simple act of poking values into RAM gave instant visual gratification.