JavaFX links of the week, May 31

by Jonathan Giles | May 30, 2010 | Links

Another week, and unsurprisingly I have another bunch of links for you folks. Thanks to everyone for blogging your thoughts and what you’re working on – it’s great to hear what everyone is thinking of and doing. As always, feel free to ping me with any links you may have that you think are worth including.

Now – on with the news!

• Richard Bair posted how to embed fonts in JavaFX 1.3. Now go wild and use as many fonts as you possibly can in a single scene: the more, the better!
• Amy Fowler has posted another of her JavaFX layout blogs, this time covering growing, shrinking and filling – new API added in JavaFX 1.3.
• Dean Iverson continues his explorations into the improved CSS support in JavaFX 1.3. As always, I highly recommend giving this post a read if you’re building GUI’s in JavaFX……and if you’re not building GUI’s in JavaFX I worry for you 🙂
• Speaking of CSS in JavaFX 1.3, Rakesh Menon has blogged about how to style ListView/TreeView controls.
• Osvaldo Doederlein has been investigating the JavaFX Script language and has some suggestions for improving it.
• Mikhail Gorshenev has created a custom ListView skin for TV. Note that this skin completely replaces the default skin, meaning that it doesn’t support cell factories or virtualisation (meaning that it is far more expensive to create huge lists using this skin rather than the one that comes with JavaFX 1.3, which is super performant).
• Exadel have updated version 1.3.1 of the JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse. If you’re curious, you can read about what’s new in this release.
• Patrick Champion has posted about creating a distortion effect in JavaFX.
• Thomas Butter has posted about working around JavaFX 1.3 video issues.

That’s all for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – I’ll catch you all again next week (or sooner if you’re on twitter) – same bat time, same bat channel.

JavaFX links of the week, May 24

by Jonathan Giles | May 23, 2010 | Links

A huge amount of JavaFX news and links this week, certainly something for everyone, I hope. As always, I’m keen to hear from you folks with any news or links you think should be included. Either message me on twitter or email me.

• The JavaFX documentation team have updated both the JavaFX 1.3 Migration Guide and the ‘Using Layout Containers‘ documentation.
• Rakesh Menon has posted a TableView implementation he has created. It makes use of our new Cell architecture for virtualising scrollable areas (e.g. We used it in 1.3 for ListView and TreeView). Whilst his approach is basic, it works in JavaFX 1.3 and may certainly meet your needs.
• Jan Goyvaerts posted an A* path finding implementation in JavaFX this week, which is very cool. He has included a very good writeup, as well as the source code.
• Osvaldo Doederlein has posted a JavaFX implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. In his usual style he dives deep into performance implications and how he thinks they can be worked around. A great post.
• Alex Ruiz has announced the release of version 1.0b1 of the FEST JavaFX compiler Maven plugin. This plug-in compiles JavaFX source and test files.
• Stephen Chin has announced a beta 2 release of JFXtras 0.7, which aims to get JFXtras working on JavaFX 1.3. Importantly, this release has controls ported over to JavaFX 1.3. He has also blogged about his upcoming JavaFX talks at Jazoon and JavaOne.
• Antoine Mischler has blogged about his thoughts on developing a business application using NetBeans Composer.
• The NetBeans team have put up a good article on data binding in NetBeans 6.9.
• The Exadel blog has a post covering some of the features of the JavaFX plugin for Eclipse that they develop.
• Nii Osei-Agyemang has started a new blog covering how he plans to use JavaFX for GIS. Some recent posts cover his planned GIS architecture, how he ported to JavaFX 1.3, and how he is making use of JavaFX web service APIs.
• Speaking of GIS, I came across the PiriMap JavaFX application which does a similar thing. Unfortunately, I only have a video to show.
• Daniel Ziltener has posted an example of how he used the JavaFX Storage API, and is seeking your thoughts on how to improve it.
• I put up the slide deck I used for the two-hour JavaFX introduction talk I gave recently.

That’s that for another week. Keep up the great work everyone – it’s great fun finding and reading what you’re working on. Catch you all next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, May 17

by Jonathan Giles | May 16, 2010 | Links

A slightly quieter week this week, but in fact there is a heap of very useful, well-considered posts this week. Be sure to check out the links below as there is plenty of useful information!

• Amy Fowler has blogged about the promotion of the ‘managed’ property from LayoutInfo to Node, and at the same time covers the implication of this move. Well worth reading if you don’t understand what managed / unmanaged nodes are.
• Tor Norbye has done a very useful blog post discussing pixel considerations in Java / JavaFX. Basically, if you’re wondering why your lines look blurred, this post explains why – and how to fix it. If you’re doing anything in JavaFX, you really should read this post.
• Rakesh Menon has shown how to use the preview TreeView control we released in 1.3. You should read this as it shows the alternative way of building a tree on-demand. It’s a very nice feature of the TreeView API.
• Peter Karich has posted a ‘matchstick graph editor‘ on JFXStudio. For others creating fun little apps, in any stage of implementation, please consider posting details about it to JFXStudio – contact me for details.
• Jim Clarke has ported Jim Weaver’s 3D demo I mentioned last week to work on a TV. You can read all about the porting (basically mapping keys to the remote control), and watch a video, on Jim Weaver’s blog.
• Johannes Schneider has posted about ‘Closing the gap between Java and JavaFX‘ by making it easier to bind between JavaFX and Java code. He says that this will eventually end up in the JFXtras project.
• Sten Anderson has released Music Explorer FX 2.0, which has significant improvements over earlier releases.
• I came across the ‘getting started with the JavaFX Composer‘ tutorial this week, and whilst I don’t know it’s age, I thought it might be useful for people wanting to play with this JavaFX RAD plugin for NetBeans.

That’s us for another week. Thanks to everyone for writing these useful posts, and as always please contact me if you think I missed something or should include a link next week. Keep up the hard work folks! 🙂