We need to provide some API such that the perceived startup performance for applets is better. This is primarily drawn up into two parts: first, improving the perception of startup from the time that the page loads to when the application runs (coffee-cup animation); second, customer provided startup animations while the full application is loaded in the background.

Page-load-to-app-start startup time:

Really two simply switches would be worth having here to make this easier. First, the ability to specify in the dtfx javascript call an image (possibly gif) to use as the background image. Second, the ability to specify a progress animation, specifically an indeterminate animation. This is probably best done simply as an image (generally gif) which can be readily created by various websites (http://www.ajaxload.info/)

application-startup-animation-while-full-app-downloaded:

This case requires some API in the runtime such that developers can provide as part of AppletStageExtension a "startup" scene that will allow them to get progress notification and such from the plugin where possible to allow them to use FX for the startup code. This requires that we can download this code and run it while the rest of the App is downloaded (we need to spec this out better, still muddled in my head).