I’ve read up a bit on Javafx but it still not clear to me whether this technology will allow easy hardware acceleration of graphics within an applet. Do people know the answer to this?
Despite Flash’s advantages in many areas of online casual gaming (especially mochiads etc), I think that hardware acceleration with applets could give them the edge over flash for many types of game.
this is probably what you are looking for:
https://scenegraph-effects.dev.java.net/
this is a sub project of the 2d scenegraph project which provides hardware accelerated effects. Java 6 update 10 enables the direct3d pipeline by default. There was also a general purpose 3d scenegraph announced but I don’t know the state of the project.
Both are designed to be easily used from JavaFX script.
Under Linux, Gnash, a Flash interpreter, already uses OpenGL. Don’t overestimate the impact of hardware acceleration in JavaFX
If I’m not mistaken Flash 10 (and I believe later versions of 9) uses scalable OpenGL/DirectX to allow fullscreen and accelerated games to be made.