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, December 28

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! 🙂

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

JavaFX 2.1 early access for Windows (build 06) now available

It has been a hectic few months for JavaFX releases recently (and before that it was a hectic year of development building up to JavaFX 2.0!). Today we have another announcement, but first, a quick timeline:

  • JavaFX 2.0 for Windows, and JavaFX 2.0 developer preview for Mac OS shipped at JavaOne in early October.
  • In mid-October we shipped JavaFX 2.0.1 for Windows. This was a security-only release.
  • Earlier this month JavaFX 2.0.2 was released, which included a huge number of bug fixes, optimisations, some new API, and an improved redistribution license.

Today we are proud to announce that JavaFX 2.1 early access is available for Windows. It has been available for Mac OS for quite some time from the same page…

The reason why I say we’re proud: we’re hitting all the targets we’re talking about, and the releases just keep getting better and more featured. JavaFX 2.1 is going to be a more substantial release, and I’m so pleased we can get you early versions of it so soon.

Now, a word of warning: don’t use the early access releases in production – it is pre-beta code and will be more buggy than 2.0.2. We’re putting this out for public use so people may test the new features and provide feedback.

As with all other releases I’ve announced:

  • Go to the forums to discuss JavaFX questions you have,
  • Sign up to the openjfx-dev mailing list if you’re interested in our open source developments,
  • File bug reports over at our Jira issue tracker.

Happy testing!

SWT Interop

SWT Interop

With JavaFX 2.0.2, we’ve included support for interop with SWT in the same way that we support interop with Swing. That is, you can embed JavaFX within your SWT applications! Although e(fx)clipse has been doing this for a little while by embedding FX -> Swing -> SWT, you can now skip the intermediate embedding into Swing and just go straight to SWT. Because FX and SWT share the same basic threading model, this is really easy to do.


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FXG to FXML in JavaFX

FXG to FXML in JavaFX

When Eileen and I were working on our session for JavaOne on Designer-Developer workflow we needed a way of converting some vector graphics from Adobe Illustrator into JavaFX. So I tried the FXG to JavaFX converter I found on the web and did not have much luck as what Eileen and draw was pretty advanced. So I thought well FXG is a XML file and FXML is a XML file and as I used to do XML->XML conversion all the time for a previous job using XSLT. I thought how hard can be be to write a converter, well about 4 hours later and some dusting off of The XSLT book here is what I came up with:


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