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.

JavaFX links of the week, October 31

Here we go for another week! ๐Ÿ™‚ 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!

Hope you all enjoyed the links – catch you all in a weeks time! ๐Ÿ™‚

OpenJDK Discussion About JavaFX

I just sent the following letter to the OpenJDK community “discuss” mailing list:

Hi OpenJDK community!

As announced at JavaOne we (Oracle) would love to contribute JavaFX into OpenJDK as a new project called “JFX”. For some who have been following along, we’ve talked about this for a long time but finally (finally!) we’re ready to act on it and open source the platform. We are not just interested in open sourcing the code, however, we also want to move into an open development model. We already have an open bug database[1]. The project uses Mercurial, so we should fit in pretty well into OpenJDK.

Our basic motivation for wanting to open source JFX is to built a community and ecosystem support and adoption around JavaFX by increasing transparency. Of course we are also interested in getting patches and early feedback from the community[2]! Our goal is to provide the next-generation Java client toolkit, and JFX would be the next step along that path, which hopefully culminates in a JSR for the Java 9 timeframe and including JFX as proper part of the JDK. I would be the initial Project lead for JFX.

A little bit about our project:
It is a significant contribution to the corpus of open source code
It includes over 6000+ public API members (methods / constructors / etc)
It includes over 11,500 unit tests
Core libraries such as observable collections and binding
Scene graph, effects, graphics
CSS support for JavaFX
Media
WebView
Prism (hardware accelerated graphics, including openGL and D3D and java2D implementations)
Glass (windowing system, base porting layer, including mac, linux, and windows implementations)
UI Controls and Charts

Our builds are all Ant, with JUnit for testing (there is some ‘make’ in there for native parts). We also have NetBeans projects setup for each area. There is a lot of code that we’ll be releasing, so as a matter of practicality we’re going to release different parts of JavaFX over the course of the next few months, starting with UI controls followed by charts. We’ll put up a full roadmap onto our project pages, should we be approved to become part of OpenJDK. We’ll make sure that the open source code is always fully buildable by anybody using the sources + a binary plug (which will become unnecessary as we open source the remaining pieces). All of the above listed modules will be open sourced and fully buildable.

What do you think? I’d love to hear any issues and hopefully be able to resolve those prior to requesting an official vote.

Thanks
Richard

[1] http://javafx-jira.kenai.com
[2] A good example of the sort of interesting stuff going on out there can be found here: http://jroller.com/neugens/entry/embed_swing_inside_javafx_2

This is the first step towards open sourcing JavaFX into OpenJDK. First I wanted to talk with the community about it, and if it looks favorable, I’ll follow up with an official project proposal. Here’s hoping! If you are a subscriber to “discuss”, please go and throw in some good word for the idea and if you have any questions I’d like to hear those too. If you aren’t a member of “discuss”, go join :-). You can do so here.

It feels good to finally be getting this all out in the open source!

JavaFX links of the week, October 24

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… ๐Ÿ™‚

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 ๐Ÿ™‚

Introduction to DataFX

Introduction to DataFX

One of the projects I worked on leading up to JavaOne 2011 was the DataFX project, which, as I wrote on the website, “is an open source project that intends to make retrieving, massaging, populating, viewing, and editing data in JavaFX UI controls easier. Itโ€™s all that boring kludge work you have to do between getting user requirements and delivering a rich user experience.”

DataFX is a project Johan Vos and I have been working on for many months now, and it has gone through a number of iterations in that time. At JavaOne 2011 we put out a first release (let’s call it version 0.0.1 for lack of an official version number), and today I want to briefly introduce it for those of you who didn’t attend JavaOne. However, even if you didn’t attend JavaOne, we’ve put the slides online.

To be very clear, DataFX is not an Oracle project! Johan and I both developed this in our own time, and it does not necessarily represent the future plans of the official JavaFX project. This project was built to make many of the UI controls I develop easier to work with by filling in the gaps as of the current JavaFX 2.0 release. Oracle may or may not have future plans in the same area as DataFX, but for now DataFX exists to fill the gap. For more details, check out the DataFX FAQ.

To make things easier to understand let’s conceptually split DataFX into two sub-projects which attack a common problem from two different angles.

(more…)

Slides from JavaOne

I’ve just returned back from three weeks in the US, and one thing I was asked very frequently during JavaOne was if I’d be making my slides available. It turns out that I don’t even need to upload the slides manually this year – Oracle has put them all up online already. If you want to find slides for (I assume) any of the JavaOne sessions, you can search the content catalog.

However, for those interested in my sessions, the three talks I gave were the following:

  1. UI Controls and Charts: Drag-and-Drop, Filtering, Sorting, Table Hookup with Charts.
    Paru Somashekar and Jonathan Giles.
    Download slides.
  2. JavaFX Datasources: Getting Real-World Data into JavaFX Controls.
    Johan Vos and Jonathan Giles.
    Download slides. For more information, visit the DataFX website.
  3. Custom UI Controls and Charts with JavaFX 2.0.
    Jasper Potts and Jonathan Giles.
    Download slides.