Unfortunately, it appears that the only way to chain JavaFX effects together is by using a Group control. (There is a Effect(input1, input2) constructor, but I can’t seem to access it from JavaFX Script, while the Blend effect doesn’t chain effects, but instead applies them in parallel).
To achieve a Coverflow-like look, we apply a reflection [...]

me: What is the long term future of javafx.ext.swing.* classes in JavaFX’s
technological roadmap? Are new Node-based ui classes in-the-works to supercede this?
Joshua Marinacci: We plan to keep the swing classes but they will only be in the desktop profile. New gui classes based on nodes are in the works. These new gui components will be [...]

Sun has released a JavaFX preview. Having played around with it, here are my questions:

Will using the scenegraph api consume less resources than a comparable app developed using DHTML? In Meebo is what’s wrong with the web (cached), Uncov writes that Meebo consumes 39Mb RAM over-and-above that of Firefox. Running a basic JavaFX app (JRE1.6u7) consumes [...]

Since JavaFX is still under active development, the JavaFX API docs could do with some serious link-love. Currently, version 0.2 of JavaFX docs ranks in Google.

I have been playing a little bit more with JavaFX. Unfortunately the language reference isn’t particularly complete, and it turns out that type casting in JavaFX is via the as keyword. (Thanks Andres Almiray for the tip!)
For example,

var myWidth = (e.node as Rectangle).width

Incidentally, the performance of the drop shadow effect leaves much to be [...]

This page is where I keep track of interaction design patterns. It will be particularly useful to implement these behaviors in JavaFX/Flex base-classes for nodes so that UX designer don’t have to nitpick over details like these:

Yorai discusses the effect of mouse clicks and shift click, control click on focus, selection, activating in-place editing, dragging
Raymond [...]

What JavaFX is not
JavaFX is not Java. It is a brand new language that builds on top of the JVM and the runtime libraries.  There is a new syntax, and a lot of new syntactic sugar aimed that reducing the quantity of code needed to

create and animate user interfaces
update user interfaces as model data changes
update [...]