Compiled JavaFX in Swing applications

[Update: I got this working with the JavaFX preview release - see this blog entry]

I've integrating interpreted JavaFX script widgets into Swing applications by using the Java 6 Scripting Engine to execute the script and have the JavaFX widget add its Canvas component to a passed in Swing parent component to allow it to integrate with the Swing application seamlessly.

So, after returning from JavaOne I was keen to integrate compiled JavaFX widgets in a similar way, to give better performance and easier deployment of multi-script JavaFX code. I thought it would be fairly simple, but I hit a few hurdles along the way.

My first idea was to extend a custom Java class in JavaFX to easily add the widget to Swing. I hit a snag when I couldn't figure out how to implement constructors in JavaFX that Java can recognise.

I tried things like:

public class javafxtest {
public function javafxtest(val1: String; val2 : String) : javafxtest {
    return this;
}
}

But whatever I did in JavaFX, Java only saw an empty constructor and another that took a boolean.

So I gave up on that and just defined an interface in Java that I then implemented in JavaFX, and that went well for a while - it's easy enough to implement interfaces in JavaFX, and I could obtain a reference to the JavaFX implementation from Java and call methods on it. So, if I call a method on the JavaFX widget that returns a JComponent then I can add that as a child of a Swing container and have integration that way, right?

Well, maybe, but I seem to have a fundamental JavaFX problem that's stopping it working. The same code works when I run the JavaFX script from the command line:

public function setupCanvas() {
 var c3:Canvas = Canvas {
     content :
         Text {
             content: "A JavaFX widget!"
         }
     }
}

At runtime in my Swing application I get the following Exception when I call that JavaFX method:

Caused by: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: javafx.ui.Canvas.(Z)V
at javafxtest.altiotest.setupCanvas$impl(altiotest.fx:77)
at javafxtest.altiotest.setupCanvas(altiotest.fx:28)
at javafxtest.altiotest.getControlComponent$impl(altiotest.fx:101)

And, er, that's as far as I can get.

I'm presuming this is because the JavaFX SDK is not finalised, that I'm using the latest OpenJFX compiler in a beta version of the Java6 JVM and I've finally tipped over the bleeding edge onto the other side where nothing works. But still, it should work, I think, so if anyone has any ideas please let me know.