NetBeans 7.1 has been released and if you look at the release notes and release overview you'll see it supports the creation of JavaFX 2.0 applications.

Amongst other updates it also includes enhancements to the Swing GUI Builder and visual debugging of Swing and JavaFX interfaces.

The NetBeans 7.1 IDE is available for download at the NetBeans website.

The FlowLayout layout manager is probably the simplest way to place components (e.g., buttons, text fields) into a container (e.g., JPanel, JFrame). All it does is put the components into a row and if that row reaches the edge of the container it starts another row. 

To find out more about the FlowLayout have a look at Using the FlowLayout or have a play with the FlowLayout example program and the GoingWithTheFlow example program.

Related Articles:

• An Overview of Layout Managers
• Using the BorderLayout
• BorderLayout Example Program
• GridLayout Example Program

Other Articles:

Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for Java EE Study Guide (2nd Ed.) Book Review

If you're upgrading to Java 7 Update 2 then it's now easier to get the latest version of JavaFX as it comes with the Java 7 Update 2 release.

For those using Java 6 Update 26 to Java 7 Update 1 the standalone JavaFX 2.02 SDK or just the JavaFX Runtime is available to download separately.

Looking at the release notes,  JavaFX 2.02 has a number of bug fixes as well including:

• Interoperability with the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT).
• A new scroll event for handling scrolling on two axes.
• A change of license to allow third party developers to redistribute the JavaFX Runtime with their applications.
• An update for the Javadoc tool for generating JavaFX API documentation in HTML.

Java 7 Update 2 has been released and is available to download from Oracle's download page.

If you look at the release notes you'll see the JDK includes the JavaFX SDK, with the JavaFX Runtime now installed with the JRE. There are also a number of improvements for web-deployed applications and a few bug fixes.