JavaFX1.2 was released on June 2 at JavaOne, 2009. Unlike Java, JavaFX has been coming up with newer releases every few months. However, like Java, JavaFX 2 (1.2) is expected to be a big success as compared to the previous releases.

That said, there have been some changes in JavaFX1.2 that are not backward compatible that would cause some of the applications to be re-written to some extent.

Some of the big changes are:

• New Layouts,
• new UI Controls - this is a big addition. UI Controls (widgets) were totally missing.
• Charts
• Alerts
• Skin class has been totally revampe.

Alerts and the UI controls have been my favorites that were dearly missing in previous releases of JavaFX.

There’s a great article over at InformIT by Jim Clarke, a JavaFX engineer at Sun, about what’s new in JavaFX 1.2.