Enough Bashing JavaFX!!
It seems to be current fashion to bash JavaFX, the damn toolkit isn't even out yet!
Give Sun a fair chance on this technology, everyone is raving about Flex, Ajax, Ms.Not, while bashing Sun for trying to keep Java & the JRE fresh & current.
For those of you who are bashing it because it runs in the JRE, PAY ATTENTION! Part of JavaFX is a new plugin & JRE version that solves the problems with the old plugin. (Fast Startup, Better Browser integration, Video).
It's asinine that people & writers are reviewing JavaFX without even understanding what it really represents.
As far as stability & platform, The Adobe Flash plugin locks my browser up 4 or 5 times a day on Linux & 1 or 2 times on my Windows machine, how is this any better than the current Java plugin?
The Java platform is also a much stronger platform than Flash or .Net, with a much better VM and true first class multi platform support (something people forget with .Net).
As far as XML, I agree that Sun's decision to use a declarative, statically typed language instead of XML was the right one, much more readable and easier to maintain. If people really want XML it would be trivial to write an XML to JavaFX translator & contribute to it, FX is after all Open Source.
I'm no Sun fanboy, but FX with the new JRE is an honest attempt buy Sun to fix mistakes that were made with Java in the past, and Sun should be congratulated for finally making Java Desktop a reality.