Tired of waiting for Javafx 1.3

I understand the desire of Oracle to wait to release the next and most pivotal release of JavaFx until they're sure it ready to go. However, I started using Fx at JavaOne 2009. It was a neat tool and a chance to really engage myself at the conference.

A friend and I started writing a video game (FxBattle) that used a bunch of new and interesting Java technologies. We had a multi-threaded server running on Clojure. We used Google's Protocol buffers for our socket level communications. JavaFx was our tool for the client front end and we were using an in house tool called the CoSI to manage dynamic listening between the Fx Client and the Java based client data model.

The development process was very quick and agile for a while. Then we ran the game. The client was brutally slow. This taught me how to hook an Eclipse debugger into a remote process and then how to hook YourKit into a JavaFx app. I believe the slowness is an issue with Bindings causing redraws more frequently than they should.

I could work around this issue, but I'm told that Soma (Fx 1.3) will fix it. When I learned this (several months ago) Soma was to be released in short order. Where is it? I've been thinking that maybe the front end would see more players if I wrote it in Flash. Then at least I'd be learning a technology that was sure to have a future...