Hot on the heels of Flash Builder 4 and Flex SDK 4, the much anticipated update to JavaFX is now with us. And WOW, this is just what I was hoping for and more.

OK, the top must-haves are now here:

• More skin-able and CSS style-able controls
• More layout classes

Without these, creating any real-world JavaFX app is just too darn cumbersome.
These additions should make it much much quicker and easier to create JavaFX apps.

A big change/addition I wasn’t expecting is the addition of some charting controls, including Area, Bar, Bubble, Line, Pie, Scatter, and X/Y. We seem to be doing more and more charting in applications at the moment so these will probably come in handy.

Another big addition is that of a load of effects classes. These will hopefully add some nice polish to our apps.

There are many changes in this release, more details of which can be found:
http://javafx.com/docs/articles/javafx1-2.jsp
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javafx/v1_2_newlayouts/

We will now be able to start creating some useful apps with JavaFX so expect more posts very soon!