Sorry for the delay in this post – with Christmas I managed to relatively disconnect from the web for a few days. Now that things are getting back to normal, I have a heap of links to share. Enjoy!

• The big JavaFX news this week was the release of early access builds of JavaFX 2.1 for Windows and Mac OS.
• Here at the FX Experience blog, Jasper Potts blogged about styling JavaFX Buttons with CSS, where he demonstrated the power of CSS in JavaFX.
• In a separate post, Jasper posted a tool he developed prior to JavaOne 2011 that converts FXG into FXML.
• As mentioned a few weeks ago, one of the new features in JavaFX 2.0.2 is support for SWT interoperability. Richard Bair put up a sample application that integrates JavaFX Charts into an SWT application.
• The OpenJFX website was updated this week to include a ‘Getting Started‘ document, as well as the first two user experience specifications for Spinner and ‘DatePicker’. These two were posted first as they are being discussed in the openjfx-dev mailing list.
• Jim Weaver was interviewed in episode 61 of the Java Spotlight Podcast.
• Toni Epple has blogged about creating a custom DateChooser control. There is a bit of broken generic code at the top of the top of the DateChooserSkin class, but other than that it is a complete example. This is a control that is planned for a future release of JavaFX, but until then there exists both this DateChooser, and the one shipped as part of JFXtras. Hopefully one of these implementations may even be incubated and adopted into a future JavaFX release, now that JavaFX UI Controls are open source.
• Adam Bien has blogged about how to compile JavaFX 2.0 applications using Maven 3.
• In a separate post, Adam gave a very simple example of how binding works in JavaFX (in the form of a unit test).
• Dustin Marx has four JavaFX-related blog posts up this week: “Simple JavaFX 2.0 Text Example“, “(Pure Java) JavaFX 2.0 Menus“, “JavaFX 2.0 Christmas Tree (JavaFX 2.0 Shapes)“, and “JavaFX 2.0 Path Alternatives“.
• Carl Dea, who recently published the ‘JavaFX 2.0 Introduction by Example‘ book, has published a sample on his blog.
• For those attending JFokus, you may be interested in the ConferenceBrowserFX application Jim Weaver has created.
• For those in the St. Louis area, Weiqi Gao is presenting at the St. Louis Java User Group on the topic of JavaFX on January 12th.
• I try to not post videos as links, but every now and then break the rules. This week I have two interesting videos to share. Firstly, Gerrit Grunwald has put up a comparison video of his SteelSeries gauges, that demonstrates the difference (or similarity) between the Swing/Java2D and JavaFX versions. The second video is from Bertrand Goetzmann, where he shows off the latest features in Grezi.

I hope you found something useful Catch you in a weeks time!

Here we go again…..enjoy!

• JavaFX 2.0.2 was released this week, bringing with it a heap of bug fixes, as well as a number of new features including SWT interoperability, and improved mouse scroll APIs. Additionally, the license was updated to allow for redistribution.
• A new JavaFX 2.0 Developer Preview release has been made available for Mac OS X.
• Coinciding with the release of JavaFX 2.0.2, the JavaFX Documentation team put out a number of new articles, covering topics such as JavaFX menus, styling charts with CSS, handling events, and others.
• The JavaFX roadmap has been updated to give more detail about future releases.
• Tom Schindl has announced the release of e(fx)clipse 0.0.9, as usual it comes with bug fixes and a few new features, including improved wizards, improvements to his fxgraph DSL, and early FXML support.
• Sven Reimers and Geertjan Wielenga have announced the eFX project, which is a JavaFX RCP based on the NetBeans RCP.
• John Smith has blogged about having a code editor in JavaFX by embedding the JavaScript CodeMirror editor inside a JavaFX WebView.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged about using ContextMenu in both JavaFX, and when embedded within a JFXPanel inside Swing.
• Dustin Marx has blogged “Hello JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by Command Line“.

Welcome to yet another JavaFX links of the week. There is, as seems to be the case these days, a heap of links. Hopefully you all find something of interest. Enjoy!

• More JavaOne presentations are available online at Parleys.com. One of the presentations I gave is now available online also (Custom UI Controls and Charts in JavaFX 2.0).
• Richard Bair posted to the openjfx-dev mailing list instructions on how to build the open source JavaFX UI controls code. It is likely that we’ll publish a slightly more proper version of these instructions that I will link to next week.
• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group has another meetup this week. This time it is Per Bothner presenting the JavaFX WebView component. As always, if you can’t be there in person they will be live-streaming the event, which often works well and is well-worth attending if you have the time.
• Dan Zwolenski has put up a blog titled “JavaFX and MVP – a smörgåsbord of design patterns“.
• For those who use gradle, there is now a JavaFX plugin available for it.
• Carl Dea has published his booked titled ‘JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by Example‘. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t offer any feedback on it yet.
• Eric Bruno has blogged about creating a custom JavaFX container.
• Jim Kay has blogged about ‘experiments in 3D in JavaFX 2.0‘.
• John Smith has created a jQuery-based DatePicker ‘control’ that you can use in your own JavaFX applications.
• Sam Howard has blogged about writing a PDF viewer in JavaFX 2.0. In a separate post, he announces the release of a NetBeans plugin that allows for viewing PDFs inside NetBeans, as well as the ability to convert PDF files into JavaFX scenegraphs. In a third link, Sam provides the download details for a JavaFX library that allows for viewing PDF files inside JavaFX.
• Geertjan Wielenga has put up a few JavaFX-related posts this week around integrating JavaFX with NetBeans. Firstly he talks about a docking framework and module system for JavaFX 2.0. In his second post he talks about enabling deeper integration of JavaFX 2.0 into NetBeans. Thirdly, Geertjan notes that JavaFX 2.0 (and most notably the ‘Henley Sales’ end-to-end sample) wowed JavaOne Latin America. Finally, Geertjan thanks JavaFX for providing an embedded browser for NetBeans.

Catch you all next week…

Ok, this post is slightly early, but I’m not going to be around much for the next three days, so I thought I’d sneak it out a few hours early rather than make you all wait. Also, because I have very, very little time to write this post, it’s going to be a little more succinct than usual. All will return to usual next week, but for now, please enjoy!

• The big news of the week is that the first code drop of JavaFX 2.0 source code was finally made public as OpenJFX. The source code is for the UI controls (which is something I work on). If you are interested in learning more about UI controls, or helping to make them better, you should definitely sign up to the mailing lists.
  
• Adam Bien posted a quick blog post on how to go about getting and compiling the JavaFX 2 UI controls source code.
  
• Tom Eugelink has announced that the MigLayoutFX2 / MigPane project has moved to become a module of MigLayout itself.
  
• Dierk Koenig has mentioned that Oracle and Canoo are offering to write a rich JavaFX client application for your needs, free of charge.
• Niklas Hoffman posted recently to the JavaFX Forums introducing a project he has been working on: a ‘JavaFX property compiler‘. You can find out more at the Google Code project site.
• In a separate Google Code project, Niklas has also showed off a TreeChart component for JavaFX.
• Jim Weaver posted a sample ‘TweetBrowser‘ application.
• In another post, Jim Weaver made available the JavaFX application he is using to present at JavaOne Brazil, titled “The Return of Rich-Client Java”.
• Mario Torre posted a JavaFX pathfinding application.
• Roman Kennke has blogged about how the SwingView works. SwingView is a component Roman and colleagues are working on to enable embedding Swing inside a JavaFX application.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged some tips about migrating from JavaFX 1.3 to 2.0.
• The Register has written a three-page post on JavaFX 2.0. Personally, I’m pleased they found the TableView control to be so performant
• Related to the article at The Register, Tom Schindl has blogged to clarify the relationship between fxgraph (his own DSL) and FXML.
• Narayan Maharjan has blogged an introduction to FXML.
• I did a post to show how to disable alternate row highlighting in TableView and ListView controls when the rows contain no content.

That’s that for another week. I’ll catch you back here in a weeks time…..