Java had the support for developing GUI applications since its version 1.0 using the AWT (Abstract Windows
Toolkit). Later AWT was replaced by Swing, which gave a little better user experience, but still lacked the
modern-looking widgets and the support for developer’s productivity. Both AWT and Swing lacked the
first-class support for data binding, efficient GUI rendering engines, easy-to-use 2D and 3D libraries for
developers, and style sheet support. JavaFX was first released in 2008 as the tool to use for developing rich
Internet applications (RIAs); it used a statically typed declarative language called JavaFX Script, which did
not attract a lot of attention from Java developers. JavaFX 2.0, released in 2011, caught the Java community’s
attention when it dropped the support for JavaFX Script and supported writing JavaFX programs using the
Java programming language. In its current version, JavaFX 8 is supported in the Java platform by including
the JavaFX runtime along with the Java runtime in the JRE. Now JavaFX 8 is considered a real successor for
Swing for building the GUI application using the Java platform.
