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, August 26

A heap of great links this week, totally ruining my pre-JavaOne quietness theory, but I’m not complaining! 🙂 Let’s get right into it.

  • Tom Eugelink has two interesting blog posts this week. Firstly, he has blogged about how to use CSS as part of the JavaFX API to make styling custom controls easier and more consistent with the built-in JavaFX controls. Secondly, he has a post about providing custom builders to the JavaFX FXML loader, so that it can handle setting properties on classes where it would otherwise fail (e.g. converting a String to a DateFormat instance).
  • Pedro Duque Vieira has a post about what is new in JavaFX 8.0, listing off a lot of the nice features coming up in the next major release of JavaFX.
  • Speaking of new features in JavaFX 8.0, Jim Weaver has posted a video of the new DatePicker control coming in JavaFX 8.0. For those of you sticking with JavaFX 2.x for the foreseeable future, it also shows the JFXtras CalendarPicker control.
  • Michael has a post about adding custom icons to the JFXtras Window control (also known as VFXWindows).
  • Robert Ladstätter has a post about an application he is calling HSV Ranger, which allows for determining HSV values for objects you show to the application via your webcam. It’s also nice to see that ControlsFX is being used in this project.
  • Speaking of ControlsFX, Eugene Ryzhikov, one of my partners in crime on that project is now using it in another of his side projects: a JavaFX-based markdown editor called Markdown Pad FX.
  • Christian Schudt has written about beefing up the animations in JavaFX with custom easing functions.
  • Granite Data Services 3.0.0.M3 is out and available for download here. You can learn more about GraniteDS 3.0.0.M3, or you can go and check out the updated sample app.
  • Daniel Ziltener has posted about getting started with JavaFX in Clojure.
  • Gerrit Grunwald has posted about a BoF at JavaOne called Raspberry Pi Showdown. This BoF is a little different in that attendees are invited to present on how they are using their Raspberry Pi’s, as long as it is JavaFX related.
  • Uwe has been working on extending the 3D Viewer app to support FBX files.
  • Felipe Pedroso, community manager at Intel was interviewed at TDC 2013 (warning: direct YouTube link) about his work on a pretty neat multitouch image viewer application.
  • Ben Ashby has posted a tip on making sure you interact with JavaFX on the correct thread.
  • Jeff Martin has published a video demo of ReportMill’s new JavaFX RAD tool, Java Inventor, creating an AddressBook app from scratch in minutes.
  • QuantCell Research have announced their JavaFX-based product is now available for purchase. As they put it, “QuantCell is a big data spreadsheet and an end-user programming tool. It improves turnaround time and enables SMEs to benefit from big data. It enables non-developers to build complex analysis, models and applications, and it brings the capabilities of major programming languages to the spreadsheet user.”

That’s it folks. Catch you next week!

JavaFX links of the week, August 19

Another week has rolled by, and so have another batch of links. This week is a little quiet, owing mainly to the pre-JavaOne quiet period that seems to happen every year (I’ve been writing this blog for so long patterns do eventually emerge) 🙂 Anywho, enjoy! 🙂

  • John Malc has published part three of his ‘Developing a Complex Bank Application in JavaFX‘ series of posts, this time focusing on the ControlsFX project. I’m pleased to read that he is happy with all the effort the ControlsFX developers (including myself)  have put into the javadocs – we really busted our gut to get a top-notch example of how javadoc should be written (although I should note that the current documentation online is for our 8.0.2 developer preview 1 release, so it is a little lower quality than we would normally have in a final release).
  • Chris Newland has posted about his Raspberry Pi TFT hack and video glasses, which run JavaFX.
  • The tomoTaka blog has an article about writing a WebSocket echo client using JavaFX.
  • Modellus 0.4 was recently released. Modellus is a freely available software package that enables students and teachers to use mathematics to create or explore models interactively.

That’s all this week. I’ll catch you all in a weeks time! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, August 11

Another week, and not surprisingly another weeks worth of Java desktop links. This week there are a number of new releases and interesting blog posts to read. Enjoy! 🙂

I hope you all found something worth reading. Catch you all again next week 🙂

Announcing ControlsFX 8.0.2 Developer Preview 1

Announcing ControlsFX 8.0.2 Developer Preview 1

I seem to be on a blogging / open source release roll at the moment, as I’ve got a new release of ControlsFX available today to go with the release of Scenic View I put out the other day. This release of ControlsFX is the first developer preview release of ControlsFX 8.0.2, and contains a number of bug fixes and new features (as always, note that 0.0.x releases in ControlsFX are major releases, despite what the number implies). For those of you playing along at home, ControlsFX is continuing to be developed at breakneck pace – we’ve so far had major releases in May, June, July and now August (we’re apparently marching at around a one-release-a-month beat).

This release was primarily driven due to changes in private API in JavaFX 8.0 b102 and later that causes ControlsFX to no longer work in these releases. Therefore, ControlsFX 8.0.0 and ControlsFX 8.0.1 releases are now effectively deprecated due to this, as they no longer work, and ControlsFX 8.0.2 developer preview 1 requires JavaFX 8.0 b102 or later.

(more…)

Announcing Scenic View 8.0.0 Developer Preview 4

Announcing Scenic View 8.0.0 Developer Preview 4

Just a really quick post about the availability of Scenic View 8.0.0 developer preview 4. This release is simply to get Scenic View working with the latest release developer preview builds of JavaFX 8.0.

For those unfamiliar with Scenic View, here’s a short blurb: Scenic View is a JavaFX application designed to make it simple to understand the current state of your application scenegraph, and to also easily manipulate properties of the scenegraph without having to keep editing your code. This lets you find bugs, and get things pixel perfect without having to do the compile-check-compile dance.

For those of you who like pictures more than text, here is a (really old) screenshot of Scenic View 1.2.0:

sv120

As always, go and download, and leave feedback as a comment in this post! I know there are bugs, but you’re running developer preview code on top of developer preview code – what did you expect?! 🙂