JavaFX was pretty good when I evaluated it around the time of JDK7/8. At the time I was also looking into other Rich Client Platforms: Adobe AIR, MS Silverlight, Eclipse RCP, and (sort-of-not really) Netbeans. Any of them could techically be used but JavaFX was the most open and likely to be supported at that time. Used it for come proof-of-concepts and it worked fine, though it took some re-orientation for some devs.