Preface

This book, as its title (JavaFX 8 Essentials) suggests, is a pragmatic book that provides you with a robust set of essential skills that will guide you to become confident enough to rapidly build high-performance JavaFX 8 client applications. These applications take advantage of modern GPUs through hardware-accelerated graphics while delivering a compelling, complex, and fancy rich-client GUI for your customer, which will impress them quite a bit.

Learning the JavaFX 8 essentials is the first step to plunging into creating applications that most importantly run on any platform, from the desktop, Web, mobile, tablets, to embedded devices such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and multi-core development. Following Java's Write once, run anywhere paradigm, JavaFX also preserves the same. Because JavaFX 8 is written totally from scratch in the Java language, you will feel at home.

Most of the chapters are a fast-paced guide that will help you get a head start on Java GUI programming, leveraging JavaFX 8 and deploying and running on any platform.

While working through the book examples, you will find code is written with JavaFX 8 on Java 8 (yes, Java SE 8) so that the new APIs and language enhancements will help you become a more productive developer. Having said this, it will be handy (and I encourage you to go for this) to explore all of the new Java 8 capabilities.

Finally, yet importantly, you will be able to develop amazing touch-less interactive motion applications with JavaFX that interact with Leap motion devices.