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!
With Christmas behind us and new years to look forward to, I’m surprised by the amount of news coming out this week. In the interests of brevity (I’m sure most of us have holidays to enjoy), let’s get straight into it.
Video from Richard Bair’s talk to the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group was recently posted, which you can watch here if you’re interested.
Jim Weaver has extended and slightly modified the rules for the JavaFX RIA exemplar competition. The competition deadline is now April 10, 2010, and it is no longer necessary to consist of a team of a programmer and a designer. Get into it as the prize is $2000, and your work will be looked over by a number of big names in the JavaFX world.
Drew has created a simple calendar control in JavaFX. At present it is just a proof of concept and certainly not a fully fledged control, but it shows the ease in which creating new controls is possible. All I can really add is that JavaFX 1.3 will make customising the appearance much easier, as our ListView control can be skinned far more easily – meaning anything list-likecan build upon all the smarts we have put into ListView (and other virtualised controls like Tree and Table).
Jeff Frieson has posted about reading newsfeeds in JavaFX in his normal code-heavy approach. Another good read if you’re keen to see exactly how to interact with RSS/Atom feeds in JavaFX.
As Richard mentioned recently, he had the honor to be the first official speaker at the first JavaFX user group meeting. You can read the slides from this presentation, and now I have decided to post the video here for those of you wanting to watch it but may have missed the live streaming.
Next up on January 13 is Amy Fowler, who will be talking about layout secrets in JavaFX. Note that this presentation is not at Google – this time it is being held at Sun. As with the first talk, you can also watch the presentation live, and participate both in the chat room, and also pose questions that may be answered by Amy at the talk.
Here we go again with another week of the best and most important JavaFX links that we could find on the net. We hope you enjoy, and find them useful.
After a successful first presentation with Richard Bair at the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group, next up to bat is Amy Fowler. She’ll be presenting about layout secrets in JavaFX on January 13. Note that the venue has changed – it is now being hosted at Sun. As with the first presentation, you don’t have to be physically in California to attend – video is broadcast live, and there is an associated chat room. You can find me, as well as a number of other JavaFX developers, in there during the presentation.
Dean Iverson posted a very interesting article investigating how to create custom controls in JavaFX, making use of Caspian code for colors and state transitions (i.e. subtle animations). The only downside is that we’ve changed how things work for JavaFX 1.3, which should make this kind of thing much easier.
Congratulations goes to Jeff Frieson for winning the latest JavaFX coding competition. This months theme was ‘holiday’, and you can see the winning entry at JFXStudio. Next months competition will be announced on new years day.
Speaking of Jeff, he has posted an article discussing how to play with perspectives in JavaFX to attain various effects. You can also find a lot more of this kind of material in the ‘Pro JavaFX Platform’ book published a few months ago.
If you’re wanting to display PDF’s from within JavaFX, today’s your luck day, as JPedalFX is a LGPL-licensed JavaFX PDF viewer. I’m not sure what is going on under the hood, but I’m guessing it’s probably a wrapper around a Swing-based PDF viewer. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but just keep in mind that this limits the portability of your JavaFX app (both to mobile/tv devices, as well as to the prism graphics stack).
One of the gratifying things about being involved in building a new platform on top of a new language is discovering new language idioms. As an industry we’d managed to put together quite a long list of patterns and best practices for Java, but since JavaFX introduces some new concepts (such as object literal notation) and makes other things really easy to do (binding, closures) it creates an environment where we need to discover the best practices and patterns that make for effective programming in JavaFX.
One such idiom has to do with encapsulation. I was presented with the following problem in a recent email. The developer wanted to create a chunk of scenegraph which looked differently depending on some flag. There would be 10 such flags with 10 such chunks of scenegraph. (more…)
