Although Java founder James Gosling has left Oracle apparently under less-than-cordial circumstances, he still can be found championing Java technologies now sponsored by Oracle.
In his blog Monday, he touts the NetBeans 6.9 IDE and, apparently, the JavaFX 1.3 multimedia platform, which he refers to simply as “FX 1.3.”
Gosling recently left Oracle after briefly serving as CTO of client software following Oracle’s January acquisition of Sun Microsystems. As a longtime Sun employee, Gosling has been called the father of Java. Oracle has pledged to continue both JavaFX and NetBeans, both of which had been Sun-developed technologies.
“The NetBeans folks are getting pretty far along in the release cycle for 6.9, and the FX folks got their 1.3 release out,” Gosling said. JavaFX 1.3 was released on April 22, the same day as a beta version of NetBeans 6.9.
“Between the two they’ve done a nice bundle that I’ve been playing around with for a while. There’s a whole laundry list of improvements. The biggest thing you’ll notice in NetBeans is OSGi support and a bunch of improvements in the ‘platform’ support (using the core of NetBeans as the basis of your own applications). It’s getting pretty sweet.
“On the FX side, the performance boosts are wonderful; as are all the new UI components and the tooling in NetBeans to support it,” Gosling said.
NetBeans 6.9 features JavaFX Composer, which is a visual layout tool for building JavaFX GUI applications. Other features include backing for both the Zend Framework for PHP and the Ruby on Rails Web framework. Debugging and issue-tracking are featured as well. The beta release can be accessed at the NetBeans Web page.
JavaFX 1.3 includes runtime improvements and a native JavaFX font family called Amble. Enhancements are featured for UI, CSS skinning and programmatic layout. Also featured is improved data binding. Startup times and animation performance have been improved as well. A mobile emulator for the Mac has been made available for JavaFX. Tools for JavaFX 1.3, including NetBeans tooling support, can be found at the JavaFX Web site.
Gosling in a blog post last month had said he would continue working in the Java space in some way. But he also indicated he required the assistance of an attorney in dealing with Oracle.
