JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse – too buggy?

After attending a meetup on JavaFX last month, I have been trying to get more familiar with the technology. I know that NetBeans is the ‘recommended‘ IDE for JavaFX, but I am an Eclipse devotee and thought that surely anything NetBeans can do Eclipse can do. Not in this case it seems.

Some simple JavaFX script just don’t seem to work with the Eclipse plugin. For example, the following snippet:

Stage {
    title: "Nodes"
    scene: Scene {
        fill: Color.LIGHTBLUE
        width: 220
        height: 170
    }
}

Causes the following error:

incompatible types found: integer required: com.sun.javafx.runtime.location.FloatVariable

The same snippet compiled and ran straight off when I tried it before in NetBeans.

The only posting on it I could find is here. I took the advice and downgraded to JavaFX 1.0, which seems to have done the trick for now. If anyone out there has any suggestions on better solutions/fixes, I would love to hear them.

This isn’t the first time I’ve spotted some better GUI related functionality in NetBeans than in Eclipse (e.g. I briefly mentioned the NetBeans GUI Builder tool a while ago). There is no chance of me stopping using Eclipse completely, but maybe I will start using both…

Tags: eclipse, ide, JavaFX, netbeans, Sun