Just a side I stumbled across:
What’s your opinion?
Seems too little too late if you ask me. HTML5 has a similar declarative model as JavaFX’s “stage”, with a much bigger installed base that’s actually multiplatform, and a community to match.
That goes for JavaFX in general actually, but I dare say even more so for games.
Maybe HTML5 is too new, but the rendering performance is horrible.
I had expected it to use hardware acceleration by now, when rendering a handful of textured quads.
(to make a skewed comparison: software rendering in Java2D beats it handsdown)
I didn’t imagine HTML5 was so slow.
I’m always willing to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m still hedging my bets on JavaFX. It failed to sieze the opportunity to make a big splash years ago, and re-releasing it for even less platforms than it supported the first time around just doesn’t strike me as the way to set the world on fire. I think HTML5 will improve faster than JavaFX will evolve.
speaking of JavaFX, just noticed this article on the slashdot front page, ‘JavaFX Runs On Raspberry Pi’.
Yeah, I notices that article. Have you seen the video demonstrating it?
After 7s the borders of the window become visible.
After 11s the first frame is rendered.
After 15s the second frame is rendered.
After 31s the framerate becomes stable, and the clock ticks at 1Hz.
That all (presumably) with a JVM that has been launched a few times already: (from 02:05)
JBY7-wckR0g
yeah, but thats a JIT JVM ported to ARM - it’s not an standard ARM JVM. That’s why the performance sucks
I’m not sure I agree. Even Dalvik (or HTML5 for that matter) performs better than this on worse hardware.
Compare that 30s-to-stabilize clock to:
o18u4jeeUPY
Indeed. Anybody got a Pi here? I’m itching to try my little games out on it.
The Dalvik VM, if anyone doesn’t yet know, is actually mostly based on the JamVM, a fully compliant J2SE JVM, which itself these days uses the OpenJDK classpath. JamVM is actually pretty performant given that it does virtually no optimisation beyond simple JITting code like the old Java 1.1 VMs used to. It’s also incredibly tiny!. Just imagine what it could do with a bit of Hotspot magic and a proper GC! In fact I know, coz I’ve played with the Sun ARM JDK 6 and it’s blazing fast…
Cas 
JavaFX is a much improved Swing/WPF/Silverlight. It is perfect for the rare scenario where you don’t want to go straight HTML/JS, but you want to build a widget-centric application with text boxes and push buttons and data grids and maybe some animations/effects on top.
But, JavaFX is not a good fit for games. Game devs should just find an OpenGL surface to pump graphics to, and have a real game engine, either something home grown or something like Ogre, on top of that.