Unlike the u17, the u18 update is not released for security, instead, it introduces many improvements on performance.

Faster Jar File Creation If you application need to create a lot of jar files, you will see about 20 percent improvement.

Hotspot VM Enhancement This includes some hardware-aware features, garbage collection improvements, class loading optimization and compile time optimization on code generation. The improved G1 garbage collector is still not yet ready for production, unless you have business support contract with Sun.

Application Startup Time Improvements If you are using JavaFX, you will notice about 20 percent improvement when launching an FX application. Web start and applet application can now download jar files concurrently.

Other improvements include runtime UI application performance, zip file reading and deployment updates. For more info, please check out here.

Other links:

JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse 3.5.x
javaFX used in Winter Olympics 2010
Review on Essential JavaFX
JavaFX How-tos

Australian Citizenship Test
Free British citizenship Test
US Citizenship Application

Java SE U18的性能提高

What does an earthquake have to do with JavaFX? It is not so obvious, eh?

After I published my post about a JavaFX Online Wish Tree Application, I received some emails from readers reporting there were some problems to start the JavaFX client of the wish tree demo. I double checked and found nothing wrong in my code and the deployment environment. So I provided some hints and started to work with those readers to troubleshoot the problem.

After a few rounds of emails back-and-forth, we finally determined that it was due to a recent earthquake occured near the Taiwan region. The earthquake caused serious damage to the communication cables underneath the Pacific ocean. These cables are backbones connecting the internet between Asia and North America. As a result, people in Asia could not visit almost 70% of web sites located in North America. Still, how was this related to my JavaFX app? Here is the fact: the JNLP file of JavaFX requires connecting to javafx.com every time the application gets launched. Due to the outage of network, users in Asia could not connect to javafx.com. This eventually caused the failure of launching my JavaFX demo.

Since Sun does not allow redistribution of the JavaFX binary code, a user must connect to javafx.com to get some necessary jar files in order to run a JavaFX application. I suppose JavaFX should provide an alternative approach to resolve this kind of issue. Right now, the workaround is to have the javafx jar/dll files uploaded to the web server and modify the JNLP file to include them for the application.

Other JavaFX Articles:
JavaFX Nodes Usded in Swing Apps       JavaFX API for Java
Building JavaFX Menu       How can Java Code Call JavaFX?