JavaFX has been the only RIA technology missing from the set included in Bubblemark. Not any longer. I built JavaFX version of the test, which uses JavaFX markup (i.e. vectors not bitmaps) for balls rendering and therefore compares directly to WPF, Silverlight and Flex.

Check out the JavaFX demo, deployed using Java Web Start here.
Here is the source code.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s very slow. The demo takes a very long time to load and start, and real time performance is disappointing. Here is how it compares:

JavaFX — 14 fps
Firefox + Silverlight (JavaScript) — 56 fps
Firefox + Flex — 62 fps
Adobe AIR — 62 fps
Firefox + Silverlight (CLR) — 99 202 fps (update: 202 fps after fixing main timer’s latency)

(All tests were performed on Pentium M 1.7 machine under Windows XP SP2)

It is 4.4x slower than Flash and 7x 14x slower than Silverlight (CLR-based variant).

On a positive side, development with JavaFX is fun, the language is very compact and efficient for building complex dynamic layouts. There is a great converter to JavaFX from SVG format and JavaFXPad is done nicely too.

If only it were 5x faster!

Chris Oliver’s early benchmarking results of JavaFX compiler suggest that there is a hope it could.

(update 08/27/07: Chris Oliver responds in his blog showing how you can make JavaFX bubblemark 5x faster! Here is his version and the source code.)

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