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 releases of ControlsFX keep rolling out the door! This month we have another developer preview release of ControlsFX 8.0.2 available for download. As usual, this release adds a bunch of bug fixes and new features. The most notable changes in this release include:

Miscellaneous:

  • Support for dates in the PropertySheet control.
  • Support for icon font packs (like Font Awesome and IcoMoon). This is inspired by Jens Deters FontAwesomeFX work, and we look forward to future collaboration with him both inside and outside of ControlsFX.
  • Improved worker progress dialog.
  • Improved ControlsFX sample application to actually work from the command line! 🙂 (Previously it only run if you cloned the repo and run from within an IDE, whoops!)

SpreadsheetView:

  • Improved API and continued development of the SpreadsheetView control.
  • Support for fixing any column to the left side of the SpreadsheetView.

Actions:

  • The introduction of an ActionProxy annotation (to create actions directly by annotating methods) which can be discovered at runtime using the ActionMap class.
  • The introduction of ActionTraits to more cleanly specify the functionality of actions when used in dialogs.
  • The introduction of ActionTextBehavior to more easily specify what text is shown in UI controls when built from an action.
  • Now that we support icon font packs and have an @ActionProxy annotation, we have linked the functionality together, so you can define an Action on a method with a font icon simply as follows: @ActionProxy(text=”Action Text”, image=”@FontAwesome:STAR”)

That is quite a nice list given ControlsFX 8.0.2 developer preview 1 only came out around a month ago! As always, head over to the ControlsFX page to download and learn how to get involved!

In general we encourage people to upgrade to this release, but do warn that of course this release is not as polished as a final release (so therefore the documentation is less complete, and the new API more likely to change). It’s up to you whether you stay on 8.01 or keep up with us 🙂

I can’t conclude without thanking the contributors to this release, including Eugene Ryzhikov, Samir HadzicHenri Biestro, Jens Deters, Ryan Jaeb, and John Malc.

Finally, I know this is a wall of text – I highly recommend you all take a moment and run the HelloControlsFX sample application – in there we try to demonstrate all the functionality, and I think (and hope) you should be fairly impressed 🙂