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.
• Lukas Hasik has posted a screencast of how to use the JavaFX ‘Composer’ plugin in NetBeans.
• 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.
• The Exadel blog shows off a currently internal project whereby JavaFX nodes are wrapped up as JSF components, allowing for them to be embedded simply within a JSF site.
• 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.
• Rakesh Menon shows how to create a ‘custom window’ in JavaFX, and also how to use JavaFX to represent data coming out of a JDBC database.

Catch you in the new year. Have a great new years party and try to step away from the computer for a bit

Dean Iverson has just now blogged about creating custom Caspian controls in JavaFX. As soon as I saw his link run up on Twitter I fired it around my team mates in the JavaFX controls team (yes, we’re still working, and in fact we’re all working precisely on what Dean is talking about). We all like what he is doing, and with JavaFX 1.3 coming up we hope to make this kind of thing far easier.

From Deans blog post:

Creating custom controls in JavaFX is not difficult. Creating custom controls that fit nicely with the default Caspian theme, with its pervasive use of gradients and animation, is a little trickier. This is only because the utility classes and methods that make it simple lie buried within com.sun packages that are not publicly documented. A little digging reveals a few gems that can be used to make your controls fit right in with the core JavaFX controls.

So, if you’re keen right now to create great looking skins in JavaFX using the Caspian technology that shipped in JavaFX 1.2, give Deans blog post a read.