Hi all. Because of the technical issues we had last week, this post includes the links for the week prior as well. Enjoy!

April 1 – April 8:

• JDK 8 Early Access Developer Preview b84 has been released, which of course includes the latest JavaFX 8.0 developer preview build.
• JetBrains have announced that IntelliJ IDEA 12.1 is now available, and it comes with great JavaFX 2.x support, including “complete support for FXML markup, custom CSS, code completion, navigation and search, refactorings, packaging tools, and integration with SceneBuilder.” This means that the three main Java IDEs (IntelliJ, Eclipse and NetBeans) all have great support for JavaFX. Personally I’ve moved back to using Eclipse (which I used for many years), and it is a joy to return to my ‘home’ IDE.
• Philipp Dörfler has been working on a project he calls sbt-fxml, which generates Scala-based controller classes for a given FXML file. I’m not a huge user of FXML, but I wonder if similar tooling could be developed for Java and other language controllers?
• Jim Laskey has a blog post exploring how to use Java FX from Nashorn (the Java-based JavaScript engine coming up in Java 8).
• Sébastien Bordes has announced the release of JRebirth 0.7.3. From the JRebirth website: “JRebirth JavaFX 2 Application Framework provides a really simple way to write sophisticated and powerful RIA’s applications. By leveraging the best of previous RIA framework, we can deliver the ultimate one to work cleanly and efficiently with this awesome API”.
• Speaking of JavaFX application frameworks, Adam Bien has been working on Afterburner.fx, a “minimalistic (2 classes) JavaFX MVP framework based on Convention over Configuration.”
• Jens Deters has updated his SelectableTitledPane blog post I linked to last week.
• Jens Deters has updated his earlier JavaFX on Raspberry Pi script to be even better.
• Jorn Hameister has posted another JavaFX fractal application, this time the Mandelbrot and Julia fractals.
• Paul Leahy has posted a few articles over on about.com about JavaFX UI controls, covering Label, Button, TextField and ChoiceBox.

March 25 – April 1:

• Richard Bair has been working like a mad man improving the build infrastructure of OpenJFX by using gradle. As his work proceeds he has been writing considerable documentation for those interested.
• Much discussion took place this week on Twitter due to the introduction of the SwingNode code into the OpenJFX repo. The SwingNode allows for Swing to be embedded within a JavaFX scenegraph (so in JavaFX 8.0 it is possible to embed JavaFX inside Swing and SWT, and Swing can be embedded inside JavaFX).
• JetBrains have posted part three of their series on IntelliJ support for JavaFX 2, this time blogging about packaging JavaFX 2 applications in IntelliJ IDEA 12.1.
• Johan Vos has an article up on jaxenter about ‘getting real world data into JavaFX UI controls with DataFX‘. More information about DataFX can be found over at the DataFX website.
• Sven Reimers has begun a series of posts on  his eFX application framework for JavaFX.
• Dierk Koenig has posted a video showing a Swing to JavaFX migration using the OpenDolphin framework.
• mihosoft have posted about how JavaFX 8.0 has seen large performance gains over JavaFX 2.x (which is something we’ve been working hard on in the 8.x development cycle).
• Sven Efftinge has put up a readme detailing the functionality offered by the xtendfx library. As he puts it, “XtendFX is a little library making JavaFX programming in Java and Xtend a joy.” It certainly does look very nice.
• Robert Ladstätter continues to work on JavaFX graphics, this time he has a video where he draws a 3D tree (yes, literally a tree)
• Jens Deters has blogged about a custom JavaFX component he has developed: a SelectablePane (essentially a TitledPane with some modifications to control its expanded state).

Catch you all next week! 🙂