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!
It goes without saying that this weeks big news item was of course the Sun acquisition, and the subsequent webcast by Oracle to outline the plans ahead for JavaFX. From the webcast it seems pretty clear that JavaFX has got a lot of support within Oracle, who plan to invest heavily in it in the coming months and years.
Here’s the most useful JavaFX links from the past week.
The JavaFX tutorial has been updated to include a gentler introduction to data binding and triggers, with a new chapter devoted exclusively to “the basics”. Also, apparently there are plans to include a more advanced article discussing this topic also.
Want tabs in your JavaFX application? Well, today’s your lucky day as toumaille has posted exactly this. His tabbed pane control appears to be well thought out, and may be of use to people out there, certainly until there is an official tab control in JavaFX.
Drew, carrying on his investigation into JavaFX and physics, has put up a JavaFX applet of a very, very simple platform game using real physics.
Krishna Kishore has created a JavaFX application that grows/animates flowers onto the screen. It’s a rather nice effect, and shows the power of the language given Krishna admits creating this program just to learn the language.
Well, I best start this week by mentioning that the Oracle takeover of Sun is edging very near. The EU appears to now be happy with things, and the word is that China’s and Russia’s competition bodies are now looking it all over. Of most interest for those of us in the JavaFX world will be the 5 hour (!) webcast being given this week by Oracle. The presentation is on Wednesday 27th January, 9:00am – 2:00pm Pacific time. You can register for it, and find out more, here.
Amy Fowler’s talk to the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group is now available for you to view online. The audio is a little poor at the start, but it gets better after about 10 minutes.
Java Champion Adam Bienwas interviewed by Sun to discuss his thoughts on JavaFX. Overall it is an interesting discussion.
A small section of Simon Morris’ book ‘JavaFX in Action’ has been edited and published online. It covers how to develop classes in JavaFX, which I’m sure a number of people will find useful.
Another contribution by Simon Morris is a ‘wipe library’, which he has provided an example application for. I had to include it for the keyboard cat reference. I think programming demos would be better with more keyboard cats.
So, my team at Sun has an opening for a guru in rich-text user interface controls. This is a big project and it’s getting a huge push. As detailed in the job spec:
This is a software staff engineering position requiring the ability to design, test, implement and maintain rich-text user interface controls. The person in this role is expected to identify areas for improvement and modification of Sun’s platform products and contribute to Sun’s overall product strategy. This person will work closely with others within the team and across teams to accomplish project objectives. May assume a leadership role in projects, including such activities as leading projects, participator in product planning and technology evaluation and related activities. May use technical leadership and influence to negotiate product design features or applications, both internally, and with open source groups as needed.
We really want to get this position filled now, so if you are keen, or know someone that is keen – apply! Working in the JavaFX team, and of course in particular the team I’m in, is a great deal of fun, and you get to work with people who really are smart and enthused about what they’re doing. You’ll learn a lot, and get to really sink your teeth into a growing technology and platform. Of course, the thrill of seeing your code used around the world is a pretty cool thing too.
So, if you have what we need, apply today, and I look forward to working with you!
Amy Fowler recently gave a talk to the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group covering her work on the JavaFX layout APIs. Her talk covers what we have now, as well as a sneak peak at what the plans are for JavaFX 1.3 (with plans still subject to change, etc). The video is embedded below for your viewing pleasure. Apologies to your ears for the first 10 minutes – there was a bit of trouble with the microphone – but it does improve after that.
Next up is Hinkmond Wong who will be presenting about mobile Java, including JavaME and JavaFX. This is on February 10th at 6:00PM at the Sun campus. You can find all other relevant details at the link above. Be sure to RSVP if you plan to attend, virtually or in person. Remember that attending virtually allows for you to watch the presentation live, and interact with both the presenter via Google moderator questions, as well as taking part in chat with others attending virtually. So it’s not much worse than being there in person!
Wow! A great week of links this week, with a number of interesting reads, some interesting code, and another upcoming JavaFX talk coming up real soon now. Here’s the links of the past week:
Richard Bair posted a very simple SplitView ‘control’ for JavaFX that you can easily reuse in your JavaFX applications. It’s not fully-fledged like it would be once it’s developed properly by Sun (so it isn’t skinable, etc), but it can be easily modified to meet your specific needs in the short term.
JavaFX.com has let me know that they’ve put up a number of new and updated how-to’s. This is a great resource for people new to JavaFX.
Simon Morris has updated his JavaFX Wipe Library, which is a collection of transition effects (think Powerpoint slide changing effects – fades, slides, reveals, flip, etc, etc).
Drew has posted a tutorial on how he created a ‘photo drop‘ application in JavaFX which makes use of Phys2D. It’s not the first time I’ve seen Phys2D used in JavaFX, with Richard Bair and Jasper Potts having used it in their Devoxx game, and Simon Morrisusing it for some demos as well.
Rakesh Menon has posted about printing in JavaFX (through using what is available in AWT).
Alexandr Scherbatiy has posted some code he wrote in JavaFX that generates fractals.
I hope that there were some useful links in there for you. Please feel free to email me (jonathan@jonathangiles.net) if you have anything you want to have linked to in a future posting. Until next week – have a great week ahead, and keep up the great work 🙂
