Archives for the month of: May, 2010

Building decent-sized applications requires layouts (unless you like pain), and the funny thing about layouts is that they’re tough…..real tough……until you bother to actually understand them. The second funny thing about layouts is that once you do understand them they’re simple and powerful. An added bonus is that your head stops hurting and your curse-words jar becomes considerably less overflowing. Finally, your children/partner/pet/pet-rock will love you more and the world will become a happier, more smiley place. This is the power of understanding layouts.

So, please, if you don’t know how to use the JavaFX layout containers, go and read Amy Fowler’s new blog. It is starting off with a bang, covering what’s new and changed in JavaFX 1.3 – and it’s well worth your time to read it. Keep reading each post until it makes sense. If you go cross-eyed or consider giving up, you’re doing yourself an injustice. Read it again!

For convenience, here’s the links you’ll want to read:

Now, go forth and read! :-)

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!

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.

I was going through my bug list today and noticed this bug, RT-4149">Document how to embed fonts in FX apps. A quick google search turned up a single forum posting on the subject which just linked back to the root bug (lucky for me I put the solution in the bug report so people weren’t completely stuck). Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any documentation on the subject here at FXExperience.com, so I thought to rectify that with a short post explaining the subject. (more…)

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.

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! :-)

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! :-)

Johannes Schneider

An absolute tonne of posts this week. It’s great to see that JavaFX is doing well, and that people are so active in improving, growing and supporting the community. Keep it up folks :-)

I warned you that this was a busy week! I hope that there was something helpful in the bunch of links above that was of particular help and/or interest to you. If I missed something out, or you just want to complain/sing my praises, please either message me on twitter (@JonathanGiles) or email me. Of course, you should also follow the @fxexperience twitter stream for news of when we post new blog posts here.

Right, that’s it for another week. Keep up the hard work folks and I’ll see you all again in a weeks time.

Important Note: Menus (and related classes) are ‘preview’ API in JavaFX 1.3, which means that the API may (and most probably will) change in future releases. However, you’re welcome to make use of these preview controls in 1.3. Read on to learn how.

Up until the release of JavaFX 1.3 it was not possible to build proper menus that ‘popped’ out of the Stage, as one expects a menu to do. It was not until we were able to expose other functionality internally that creating proper menus became possible. As already warned, in JavaFX 1.3 menus are preview controls whilst we firm them up and get feedback from the community. In this post I wanted to outline the API, and what options you have for styling them using nothing more than CSS.

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It’s nearly the end of my time in California – I head back to New Zealand tomorrow evening – but before that I need to post a new JavaFX links of the week. This week there were a tonne of posts, and so this post is very long. I had to keep my comments to a minimum as otherwise the post would have been even longer. Let’s get into it!

Wow, that’s a heap  of posts. Hope there was something there for everyone. As always, feel free to email me if you have anything you want included or to just generally discuss. Have a great week everyone :-)