You might believe JavaFX is quite a new technology, but it actually isn't. JavaFX has been here for a long time; unofficially since 2005. Ever since Sun Microsystems acquired the company SeeBeyond, there has been a graphics-rich scripting language known as F3 (Form Follows Function), which was created by engineer Chris Oliver.
At the JavaOne 2007 conference, Sun Microsystems officially unveiled JavaFX as the language's name instead of F3. During the period 2007 to 2010, Oracle acquired many big companies like BEA Systems, JD Edwards, Siebel Systems, and so on. I was working for Oracle with the responsibility of integrating different customer support channels to the Oracle support website MetaLink, as it was called at that time.
On April 20, 2009, Oracle Corporation announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, making Oracle the new steward of JavaFX.
At JavaOne 2010, Oracle announced the JavaFX roadmap, which included its plans to phase out the JavaFX 1.3 scripting language and recreate the JavaFX platform for the Java platform as Java-based APIs. As promised, JavaFX 2.0 SDK was released at JavaOne in October 2011.
In addition to the release of JavaFX 2.0, Oracle took the platform to the next level by announcing its commitment to take steps to make JavaFX open source, thus allowing Java's versatile and strong community to help move the platform forward. Making JavaFX open source increased its adoption, enabled a quicker turnaround time on bug fixes, and generated new enhancements.
Between the versions JavaFX 2.1 and 2.2, the number of new features grew rapidly. JavaFX 2.1 was the official release of the Java SDK on Mac OS. JavaFX 2.2 was the official release of the Java SDK on the Linux operating system.
There was no such thing as JavaFX 3.x, but the big change in the Java development world happened with the Java SE 8 release, which was announced on March 18, 2014. Java SE 8 has many new APIs and language enhancements, which include Lambdas, Stream API, Nashorn JavaScript engine, and JavaFX APIs, which are being incorporated into standard JDK bundles, and JavaFX version becomes 8 as direct successor to JavaFX 2.0.
To see all of the new features in Java SE 8, visit http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8-whats-new-2157071.html.
The answer is now. As mentioned before, Java SE 8 was released on March 18, 2014. For developers who use Java to build client-site applications, the JavaFX rich Internet application framework supports Java 8 now.
Most of the Java enterprise edition vendors support Java 8 too. Whether you move to Java SE 8 right away depends on the kind of projects you're working on.
Note
In fact, as outlined in the Oracle JDK Support Roadmap, after April 2015, Oracle will not post further updates of Java SE 7 to its public download sites.
The JavaFX APIs are available as a fully integrated feature of the Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) and JDK. The JDK is available for all major desktop platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Linux), therefore JavaFX will also run on all major desktop platforms.
Relating to JavaFX 8, it supports the following APIs:
3D graphics
Rich text support
Printing APIs.