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.

The JavaFX 2.0.2 release is now available for download. Along with a heap of bug fixes, notable improvements include:

  • Interoperability with the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT).
  • New scroll event that handles scrolling on two axes and replaces the MouseEvent.MOUSE_WHEEL_ROTATED event.
  • Change of license, which enables third party developers to redistribute the JavaFX Runtime with their applications in accordance with the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement for the Java SE Platform Products and JavaFX.
  • Updated doclet for the Javadoc tool that is used to generate JavaFX API documentation in HTML format.
  • Updated NetBeans projects for the JavaFX samples for use with the NetBeans 7.1 release.

The JavaFX documentation team has also put out more documentation to explain a number of areas, including:

  • Styling Charts with CSS describes how to alter the visual appearance of charts in your application. Using the various CSS classes and properties you can set an alternative color scheme, add images and graphical effects, modify the chart legend and plot, and even invent new chart symbols.
  • The Menu chapter of the JavaFX UI Controls tutorial describes how to build a menu bar in your application, add menu items, assign specific actions to each item, and set a context menu for a node.
  • Handling JavaFX Events describes how to create and use event handlers and event filters to process user interactions with your application.
  • Using a Doclet with JavaFX describes how to use the Javadoc doclet that was created for use with JavaFX source code. Using the doclet with the Javadoc tool produces customized HTML documentation.
  • Deploying JavaFX Applications describes a new JavaFX Ant helper parameter, <fx:argument>. Also new is a mechanism for passing images to the <fx:deploy> task. Use <fx:icon> to pass icons for various purposes or <fx:splash> to pass a splash screen image for Web Start applications.

Relevant links: