Josh On Design

As we all rush headlong into JavaOne prep someone (okay it was James Gosling) sent me an email about performance of JavaFX. Speed is a crucial issue for anything dealing with user interfaces, so we care deeply about performance in our work with JavaFX. On the other hand we are focusing on bug fixes and correctness right now, not optimization, so it's not as fast as it could be.

So how do we fare?

Well, as a rough measurement, since there aren't any real benchmarks yet for rich internet applications, we have been using a website called BubbleMark, which has a simple graphics application written in many different languages/runtimes. It's the closest thing we have to a cross platform bench mark.

So, how do we fare?

James had this to say: "I just tried it on a MacPro running JDK6(developer preview 10) and the swing version runs at 198 fps with 32 balls, and the JavaFX version runs at 186 fps. Flex (cached) ran at 58...".

So JavaFX's graphics layer, built on the currently un-optimized SceneGraph library, is only a few percentage points behind the plain Java2D/Swing version, and they are both 3 to 4 times faster than the Flex version. Not bad!