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I did not attend this year's Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne conference. However, being a coauthor of a JavaFX book, naturally I'm interested in any JavaFX news from the conference.

The first hint of of something unusual happening comes from twitter. Someone simply twitted "JavaFX Script is dead." (I can't find the link I saw now, but this one is close enough.) Then a thread on the javaposse Google group discussing the same. Then the blogs:

• Steve On Java: JavaFX 2.0 (a.k.a. What Just Happened to JavaFX Script?)
• Richard Bair, Oracle: JavaFX 2.0
• Peter Pilgrim: JavaOne 2010 Part 2: Whatever Happened To Christopher Oliver?
• Steve On Java: Announcing Visage – The DSL for Writing UIs
• Alex Ruiz: JavaFX 2.0 opens new doors: tools!

For those who are not paying attention to JavaFX, the change is sweeping: Oracle will abandon JavaFX Script the language, putting on hold the JavaFX Mobile initiatives, and bring the graphics stack underneath JavaFX 1.x back into Java. Such a reappropriated JavaFX 2.0 stack will be previewed next year and be available some time later.

The selling point of the new JavaFX 2.0 is that a Java API can then be used from any JVM languages including JRuby, Clojure, Scala, and Groovy. And I guess that made everyone happy.

Not me!

I firmly believe JavaFX Script is an unfair victim of a failed strategy that Sun pursued near the end of its life to get JavaFX Mobile adopted. The cause of that failure has everything to do with the dynamics of the businesses of the mobile industry and probably have little to do with JavaFX Script the language.

But that's life.

I'm very grateful to Stephen Chin for taking the initiative to establish a new home for the GPLed JavaFX Script language compiler at http://visage-lang.org/. Unlike JavaFX Script in JavaFX 1.x, which is the only language for the platform, Visage will have to compete with the other popular JVM languages for the honor of the language of choice of writing JavaFX 2.0 GUIs. I believe it has a very good chance of achieving it.

Since the world won't see JavaFX 2.0 for a while, we'll just have to wait.