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.

Update: since announcing the JavaFX UI controls sandbox I have announced the ControlsFX project, which is a more convenient way to get access to a number of controls that do not ship with JavaFX. Check out the ControlsFX website for more information.

This is something I’ve been waiting a really, really, really long time to announce, but it has finally happened. Today I am so pleased to announce the opening of the JavaFX UI controls sandbox repository on OpenJFX. This repo is a fork of the JavaFX 8.0 controls repo, but will occasionally sync from there to keep it up to date. This repo is intended for OpenJFX developers to put their ‘toys’ until such time that they get called up to the big leagues for inclusion into OpenJFX itself (although there are no guarantees that this will ever happen). This means that the controls are functional, but most probably not feature complete with a finalised API or any significant documentation.

The reason why I’ve been wanting to open this sandbox up is so that members of the JavaFX community can get super early access to our controls as soon as they reach the most minimal level of maturity, and help guide them along their paths to adulthood. I also wanted to do this as it takes a long time between developing a UI control and having it appear in a JavaFX release. This is something that has frustrated me, and a number of you, to no end.

From the get-go there are a few controls in this repo that you may be interested to play with and give us feedback on. They are TreeTableView (although note this is currently undergoing a total rewrite), Dialogs (ala JOptionPane from Swing), TableView cell span support (look at TableView.spanModel for more info), and a RangeSlider control. These controls will develop over time, but of course we’re always on the lookout for others who want to improve these controls for us. If you’re interested specifically in tending to the new controls in the sandbox, please email me and we can discuss it.

So, for those of you interested in taking a look at the code, you can do a ‘hg clone’ of the following url: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/sandbox-8/controls/rt.

Now, I guess this post wouldn’t be complete with a few screenshots of the early in-progress controls. Enjoy! 🙂

A selection of the various dialogs available from the Dialogs class.

The RangeSlider control – supports both horizontal and vertical layout.

 

TableView cell spanning

 

TreeTableView