FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

I've been maintaining FX Experience for a really long time now, and I love hearing from people who enjoy my weekly links roundup. One thing I've noticed recently is that maintaining two sites (FX Experience and JonathanGiles.net) takes more time than ideal, and splits the audience up. Therefore, FX Experience will become read-only for new blog posts, but weekly posts will continue to be published on JonathanGiles.net. If you follow @FXExperience on Twitter, I suggest you also follow @JonathanGiles. This is not the end - just a consolidation of my online presence to make my life a little easier!

tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.

Zhang: PacMan Tutorial

by | Jun 9, 2009 | API Design, General, Links

A nice little set of articles by Henry Zhang and Jim Weaver at O’Reilly’s InsideRia.com detail how Zhang wrote a PacMan game in FX. From the article:

When I was young I was fascinated by arcade games. One of my favorites was the Pac-Man game. Recently, when I was learning the JavaFX language, I decided to write the game in JavaFX. Based on my experience in other programming languages, I assumed there would be some amount of work in building a game such as Pac-Man, giving me a good feel for RIA development in JavaFX.

A quick perusal reveals at least one no-no that we should document better: never subclass the Shape classes. They weren’t meant to be subclassed, and if JavaFX Script gave us “final” we’d have used it. Rather, use a CustomNode. The only three Node classes in JavaFX 1.2 that were intended to be subclassed were CustomNode, Control, and Container.

I’m not sure anything bad will happen to you if you subclass one of the shapes, maybe we’ll relax this restriction in the future. Primarily, we just never intended this usage. But hey, sometimes the best things aren’t intended! Its great to see some detailed examples coming out about JavaFX, can’t wait to see more!

JavaFX UI Controls

by | Jun 7, 2009 | API Design, Controls

The recent 1.2 release of JavaFX included our first set of UI Controls. We talked about these recently at JavaOne. We’ve uploaded our slides to the controls portion of the talk. Unfortunately, the slides don’t contain all of the “filler” text you get when presenting the slides, so I’ll provide a little context here. (more…)

Clarke: What’s new in JavaFX 1.2

by | Jun 7, 2009 | Charts, Controls, Layout

There’s a great article over at InformIT by Jim Clarke about what’s new in JavaFX 1.2. Jim has been involved in JavaFX both contributing to the source and building apps since before I got involved last year.

From the article:

Once you start using JavaFX, I think you’ll find that the language is powerful yet very concise. You’ll be amazed at the things you can do with very little code. I have only discussed a few of the new JavaFX 1.2 user interface features—there’s much more to the entire JavaFX platform. I hope that this overview will provide just enough enticement for you to start your own exploration.