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As you might have heard from James Weaver or Stephen Chin, or Joshua Marinacci, the book Jim Weaver, Stephen Chin, Dean Iverson and I have been working on for the last few months

entered Apress's Alpha Program.

While I have told friends and colleagues that I'm co-authoring a JavaFX book, and I twittered it once, I have not officially announced it in my blog. So this may come as a surprise to some of you who reads this blog regularly. Although the lack of new blog entries recently should have tipped you off that something is up with Weiqi.

So why?

I started following JavaFX from the JavaOne 2007 announcement. I did my first JavaFX talk at the St. Louis Java Users Group on July 12, 2007, perhaps the earliest one outside Sun. I then watched the compiled version of JavaFX Script language being developed as open source by people like Brian Goetz, Per Bothner and colleagues at Sun. And Jim Weaver asked me to be a tech reviewer for his first book on JavaFX in late 2007.

All along, my biggest impression of JavaFX Script is that it's a fun language to program in and, because of its GUI DSL focus, it has the potential of becoming a very useful language in that field. Therefore by the Summer of 2008, when I wanted to do a talk at OCI's famed Java lunch, I offered to talk about either JavaFX or Clojure, which is another language that I think has a potential, although in a different area. Most of my colleagues wanted to hear about JavaFX, so that's what I presented. I presented on the Friday before the release of the JavaFX Preview SDK at the end of July. Naturally I focused on the language features because the other parts are not open source. I wondered aloud about Sun's intentions. (Ironically, that post remained on Sun's most popular JavaOne blogs for quite a while.)

The July talk turned into a December 2008 JNB article, which went to press three days before JavaFX 1.0 was released. The responses from the JavaFX community was very positive. It even got a nod from the source of it all—Chris Oliver.

Meanwhile, my "It works on Linux" series of tips for how to run JavaFX on Linux (seen here, here, here, and here) became popular. I had gotten hundred times more hits from these blog entries then the other average blog entries, which for me is proof that JavaFX is being at least tried out by a lot of people.

When Jim asked me to join the Pro JavaFX Platform team, I gladly agreed. The writing process is harder than I anticipated, but the brilliance of the other team members pulled me through, and I think the result is a book that a lot of people can use and learn.

Like Stephen Chin, I did my writing in the evenings and weekends while working on my day job during the day. Changing of projects added to the suspense. Imagine my internal reaction when Ken called and asked "Weiqi, do you know X?" (X being something other than Java, which is my main job function.) "I took a look at it five years ago." "Can you join this death march project (using X)?" "Sure." The expectation was that I will brush up my X during the evenings and weekends and be an X expert during the day.

The lesson I learned is that book reading and book writing are two incompressible tasks. I cut back my sleep time and blogging time.

Now that the book is here in alpha form. We invite everyone to read it, learn JavaFX, and let us know any deficiencies it may still contain. That way we can make the final book better.