The preview release of JavaFX is now available, along with libraries, samples, documentation and some early tools. If you like to make pretty things fly around on the screen, this is a pretty tasty piece of work. It really shows what Swing and Java2D can do. A pile of folks have been working hard on it for quite a while and have done a lovely job. Try it out and let us know what you think.

One of the cooler tricks is the approach to integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. These two popular tools have proprietary (deep dark secret) file formats, so importing them is problematic, but they do have extensive SDKs. So rather than building import filters into NetBeans we built export filters for the Adobe tools that generate JavaFX code (!) from the illustrations. It's then a clean process in NetBeans to add behavior to them.

Enjoy!