JavaFX links of the week, October 31

by Jonathan Giles | Oct 30, 2011 | Links

Here we go for another week! 🙂 It seems the number of JavaFX links is really starting to pick up after JavaOne. The most notable news this week was that Oracle has started the open source discussion. Find all the details, and plenty of other interesting links, in this weeks JavaFX links roundup!

• This week we made our next move along the road of open sourcing JavaFX, with Richard Bair posting a message to the OpenJDK discuss mailing list. Additionally, he blogged about the plans. As we’ve mentioned, we really encourage your feedback and participation in this project!
  
• Zonski continues his series of blogs on FXML and controller injection (with Guice). This week there are four blog posts from him: “Multiple Controllers with Shared Resources“, “Views within Views, Controllers within Controllers“, “Generic Controllers“, and “Better Controller Injection with Guice“.
  
• Mario Torre blogged about work he and two colleagues have been doing to enable embedding Swing inside a JavaFX application (the opposite of what is officially supported in JavaFX 2.0 using the JFXPanel component). Whilst not available currently You can see their work over at their GitHub repo, and elsewhere they have announced a willingness to contribute this back in to the open source JavaFX project.
• Tom Eugelink has announced an updated release of MigLayoutFX2 (also known as MigPane). This release adds support for the final JavaFX 2.0 release.
• Kai Tödter has shown off the power of the JavaFX CSS styling functionality by making a dark style and showing how little CSS is required.
• The JavaFX team has its ears to the ground – we hear your feedback! The most recent example of this is the changes we’ve made to the need to have an OTN account to download the JavaFX 2.0 SDK. As announced earlier this week, this is no longer required.
• Along the same lines, the JavaFX documentation team is seeking your feedback on what you want them to write about. These guys do an amazing job, and they are always trying to find new documentation topics. If you feel something is under-documented, talk to them and you may just find a whole heap more documentation will start appearing on this topic.
• Steve Northover (previously involved with SWT, now working in the JavaFX team) has a talk at EclipseCon Europe 2011 on “JavaFX Past, Present and Future and Interop with SWT and Swing”. The talk is next week.
• Stephen Chin discusses JavaFX and the state of client-side Java in a YouTube video posted by O’Reilly.
• Gail Anderson has put up a blog post on building a JavaFX ‘Sketch Pad’ application using custom binding.
• Wayne Young has been playing around with JavaFX, most notably creating a JavaFX application that integrates JBox2D physics, a side scroller  (with update), and a ‘crazy bookshelf‘. In all cases the code is there for you to explore and experiment with.

Hope you all enjoyed the links – catch you all in a weeks time! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, October 24

by Jonathan Giles | Oct 24, 2011 | Links

Having been traveling for the last three weeks, I’ve not been able to post the weekly JavaFX links roundup. Today I’m trying to make up for this by posting all the links I gathered as I was traveling (and on vacation). There are two problems with this approach: 1) what follows is basically information overload, and 2) I almost certainly missed links. I hope you can all forgive me for this one time, and I also hope you find a heap of interesting links in this post (it took me a looonnggg time to write this week!).

Whilst I’m here, I must note that it was great meeting so many people at JavaOne. The number of times I was speaking to someone who didn’t know me, only to see my name badge and know exactly who I was because of this blog was actually very impressive. I’m surprised so many of you read this blog! Anyway, with that (and because this post is already long enough) let’s get straight into it… 🙂

• The big news out of JavaOne for JavaFX was the general availability release of JavaFX 2.0 for Windows, and the beta release of JavaFX 2.0 for Mac OS X. A number of sites posted articles relevant to this.
• Following hot on the heels of the JavaFX 2.0 release is JavaFX 2.0.1, which is a security-only update released in-sync with all other Java security updates (which explains why it was released so soon after 2.0).
• We’ve also put out another build of JavaFX 2.0 beta for Mac OS X, taking the build number up to version 5.
• My partners in crime here at FX Experience, Richard Bair and Jasper Potts, have been busily blogging, including posts titled “Don’t use impl!“, “JavaFX Technical Keynote at JavaOne Video“, “JavaFX sessions at JavaOne 2011 online“, “FXML: Why It Rocks, And The Next Phase“, and “Correctly Checking KeyEvents“.
• A number of blogs have appeared online related to JavaFX FXML being used in conjunction with dependency injection frameworks. Firstly, Tom Schindl has blogged about JavaFX FXML and Google Guice. Following this, Richard Bair blogged about exactly the same topic. Finally, Zonski has blogged about JavaFX FXML and Spring, and in a separate post, ‘better controller injection‘.
• Speaking of Jasper, he was recently interviewed by the Java Spotlight podcast regarding the JavaFX 2.0 release.
• The Oracle Media Network has five videos related to JavaFX 2.0 features: graphics, UI controls, animation, effects, and embedding web content.
• Tom Schindl has also been very busy on his e(fx)clipse project, putting out version 0.0.7, which includes a number of new features, including new wizards, live preview support for editing his ‘FXGraph’ DSL, auto-completion of FXGraph, support for dependency injection, and the start of an application framework.
• Mr LoNee has blogged about a similar feature as mentioned above – a ‘NodeCodeEditor‘ that live previews what is happening as code is being edited (although there are constraints, so be sure to read the blog post completely).
• Jide Software has released a free-to-use JavaFX RangeSlider control (that is, a Slider that has two thumbs rather than one). All I can say is keep up the great work! I want to see a thriving 3rd party controls ecosystem in JavaFX! 🙂
• At JavaOne we demonstrated JavaFX running on various tablet devices. Whilst this is not in any public roadmaps yet, there have been a few writeups on this demonstration that may be of interest.
• Another big JavaOne announcement was the plan to open source the entire JavaFX stack through the OpenJDK.
• One of the talks I gave at JavaOne (along with Johan Vos) was about our DataFX project, related to simplifying the population and rendering of ListView/TreeView/TableView controls. Just today I did a better write-up explaining what the project is, and (hopefully) enticing more people to play around with it.
• All JavaOne slides appear to be online for public consumption. I posted a blog post that links to the three talks I gave, as well as a link to the content catalog where you may download all other slide decks.
• Roman Kennke has posted about “JavaFX 2 — The new Swing ? (!)“.
• Bertrand Goetzmann has updated his Grezi application with JavaFX 2.0 GA support, and now uses the latest GroovyFX release. He has put up a video that demonstrates the HTML 5 slideshows feature.
• Patrick Webster has ported a Pac-Man clone that was originally written for JavaFX 1.3.1 to use the new JavaFX 2.0 release.
• Dustin has blogged about the NetBeans 7.1 beta, and how it can be used for developing JavaFX 2.0 applications.
• Hamilton Matos has blogged about ‘Building JSF 2.0 Composite Components Based on JavaFX with NetBeans‘.
• Gail Anderson has two new JavaFX 2.0 blog posts online, both about animation and binding. The first post creates a simple countdown timer, whilst the second post extends the first by adding a progress bar into the mix.

Phew! That’s that for another week. I’ll get back into the regular schedule starting next week, so hopefully next weeks posting won’t be as great an ordeal (for you and me!) next week. Catch you all in a weeks time folks 🙂