FX Experience Has Gone Read-Only

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!

tl;dr: Follow me on Twitter and check for the latest news on JonathanGiles.net.

We’ve just rolled out another JavaFX 2.0 beta build (build 37) to get you access to FXML as quickly as possible (rather than wait until next weeks b38 release).

FXML is a scriptable, XML-based markup language for constructing JavaFX user interfaces. It is an alternative option for building your user interfaces, in addition to using Java, or any other JVM-based language (or a wrapper like GroovyFX). To quote the JavaOne session abstract on FXML: “The hierarchical structure of an XML document closely parallels the structure of the JavaFX scene graph, making it easy to visualize the resulting output. Event handlers can be written with any JVM-compatible scripting language, such as JavaScript, Groovy, or Clojure. Additional features include on-the-fly localization, dynamic data binding, and code modularization.”

Whilst we rolled out b37 as soon as we could to get you access to FXML, we are still working on a sample of how to use it – and this will be in the next public beta build. Additionally, we are busily working on plenty of documentation on how to use FXML which will become available in our documentation area as soon as it is ready. Who knows, if there is enough pleading in the comments on this blog post, maybe I can try to get someone to write a blog post here about the wonders of FXML 🙂

Of course, along with b37 including FXML, it also contains a weeks worth of bug fixes, performance tweaks and necessary API changes (based in no small part on your feedback to our Jira tracker). As always, I look forward to hearing your feedback on this latest release. The best place to discuss JavaFX 2.0 is at the OTN forum, where many of the JavaFX team lurk. However, file your bug reports / request for enhancements directly to our Jira tracker if you want to maximise your chances of being heard!