Tinkering with JavaFX

One of my hobby goals for the holiday season just gone was to look at JavaFX and see if it was worth using for a project. I even had a project in mind : The character generator for the Battlestar Galactica RPG. I've written one for the Serenity RPG called Composure and the two systems are close to identical. I could re-use all the model code for the BSG version and try a fancy new JavaFX GUI .

Here's what happened.

1. A Google for "eclipse javafx plugin" produced openjfx which hadn't had a release since June, nearly six months before JavaFX was released.
2. I found another plugin at Project Kenai which requires a full J2EE version of Eclipse ( a big download in itself), doesn't have an update URL and is a really early release.
3. I installed NetBeans and did the JavaFX tutorial.

Now NetBeans seemed as foreign to me as I expected it would, but I perservered. I got a lot of the tutorial done, and liked what I saw. I then hit a point where the JavaFX would not run . I got an unhelpful NullPointerException in the stack trace that told me nothing and strange spanner icon in the file window. No red errors and no tooltip over the spanner icon. Am I using NetBeans wrong or am I using JavaFX wrong ? How could I tell?

To be fair I hit the same problems when I switched from TextPad to Eclipse back in 2005 but then I had an office full of fellow developers I could ask. Today I don't know anybody who uses NetBeans and experience told me what a forum post would probably get me (Nothing, "RTFM noob!" or some derivative). Besides it was that strange lull time between Christmas and New Years - who would be on the forums that could help ?

I could handle learning NetBeans, I really could. I could handle learning JavaFX and indeed it does look both promising and usefull. But it's both at the same time thats the problem. What did I do ?

I gave up. Frak it, it was just a little holiday tinker project. I'll keep using swing for now. If and when a decent plugin emerges for Eclipse I'll try JavaFX again. I wonder how many other Eclipse devs will feel the same?

Talk about cutting off the air supply ......