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, December 30

by | Dec 29, 2013 | Links

Understandably it is a quiet week of links this week, but that doesn’t mean things have ground to a complete halt – there have been a few open source releases that you should definitely explore.

  • Johan Vos has announced the release of DataFX 2.0. As mentioned in the blog post, “DataFX 2.0 runs on top of both JavaFX 2.2 as well as JavaFX 8. We are now starting the work on DataFX 8, which will only run on JavaFX 8. We might release a DataFX 2.0.1 version containing bugfixes, but only if there is a real need for.”
  • ControlsFX 8.0.4 was released this week. It was a minor release mainly resolving an issue in the 8.0.3 around loading images from within the ControlsFX jar file (for things like dialogs). This is now fixed in 8.0.4.
  • TestFX 3.0.0 has been released. This is an excellent library for writing unit tests for testing your JavaFX user interfaces. I recommend you check it out.
  • Hendrik Ebbers has blogged a preview of the DataFX controller framework. This framework helps to create the views of applications, define actions on them and create flows that contain a subset of views.
  • Whilst I don’t make a practice out of job advertisements, given it is a quiet week I thought I’d mention that a company called Anahata, based in Australia, is looking to hire a JavaFX developer (from anywhere in the world) to help them with their projects.
  • GraniteDS 3.0.0.GA has been released. GraniteDS is an event-driven, cross-framework, application client container.

That’s all folks. Catch you again next week.

JavaFX links of the week, December 23

by | Dec 22, 2013 | Links

I’m on holiday this week (and for most of January), so I’m keeping today’s post brief and to the point. Also, next week my first son is due, so whether there is a post anytime next week is up in the air. I hope you’ll understand! 🙂 Anyway, enjoy! 🙂

  • The JavaFX Prague Team blog has a JavaFX on Android follow-up post, summarising the current state of the art.
  • Tomas Mikula continues to work on his CodeAreaFX UI control, which is a “text area for JavaFX that supports assigning style classes for ranges of text. It is intended as a base for code editors with syntax highlighting.”
  • There seems to be a lot of interest recently in adding a date axis to the JavaFX chart API. This week Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about a DateAxis API he has developed that makes use of JSR 310 (new date and time APIs). It would be great to see the community pull together some improved / additional APIs for the charting component of JavaFX and to contribute these back to JavaFX *hint hint* 😉
  • Speaking of JSR 310, Florian Brunner has upgraded his Drombler Commons API to use the new Java 8 Date and Time APIs.
  • Pedro Duque Vieira has two posts this week. Firstly has has posted about his Metro-styled PasswordField for JavaFX. Secondly, he has a post detailing some of the changes in the JavaFX controls API coming up in JavaFX 8.0.
  • Mark Stephens has a post introducing a PDF viewer for JavaFX written solely using JavaFX technologies.
  • Christian Schudt has recreated Tetris in JavaFX, and has posted the code online for your learning pleasure.
  • Andy Till has made available code for his ‘Cavity Search’ project. As summarised by Andy, “Cavity Search is a UI search library for any JavaFX UI. Given a node instance, Cavity Search will go through the nodes hierarchy, finding all text. When it finds a text match it will create a highlight node that can be added to your scene.”

Catch you all (possibly) next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, December 16

by | Dec 15, 2013 | Links

Another week, another bunch of links. Enjoy 🙂

  • Hendrik Ebbers has collected together in one blog post links to all JavaFX-related talks at JavaOne 2013. If you missed a session (or didn’t go to JavaOne), then this is an invaluable resource. I’m slowly working my way through the sessions.
  • This week JavaFX on iOS got a boost with the availability of tooling in NetBeans to help make the creation and packaging of iOS projects much simpler. This project makes use of RoboVM.
  • Pedro Duque Vieira has created an ErasableTextField control which shows a clear button when text is entered, and he has also styled it to appear as expected in his JMetro project. In a separate post, he has also given a DateAxis and XYBarChart update.
  • Sven Ruppert has posted an overview of Adam Bien’s afterburner.fx MVP framework.
  • Speaking of MVP frameworks / dependency injection, Jens Deters has blogged about his own investigations into this area. From his post: “Finally I merged ideas from Adam (convention over configuration) and Alex & Co. (CDI) and modified them for my needs. I tried to keep the API as simple as possible and to reduce overhead to a minimum.”
  • Speaking of application frameworks (again!), Sébastien Bordes has announced that JRebirth 0.7.6 has been released this week. It brings some threading improvements and add a default JavaFX preloader with some basic API enhancement.
  • And to round the whole app framework links off, Sébastien Bordes has offered his opinion on CDI vs JRebirth.
  • TestFX 3.0.0 has been released. TestFX is an easy-to-use library for testing JavaFX. TestFX provides a fluent and clean API for interacting with, and verifying the behavior of, JavaFX applications. This releases includes JavaFX 8 support and removes the need to fork the JVM between tests.
  • Tomas Mikula has announced InhiBeans. As he puts it, “When there is a network of bound values, it often happens that a single user action on one end of the network results in a succession of changes of a value on the other end of the network. Most of the time redundant invalidation and change events do not cause problems, but they can come with a performance penalty if the attached listeners eagerly perform expensive computations. InhiBeans help inhibit this invalidation madness.”
  • Christoph Nahr has released version 1.2 of his MIME Browser offline email reader client.
  • If you’re interested in using JavaFX but would rather program in Scala, today is your lucky day as jpsacha has ported the Pro JavaFX Platform book examples to ScalaFX.
  • Sai Pradeep Dandem has released a PatternLock control for JavaFX, for use when unlocking a mobile device by dragging your finger across a 3×3 grid to create a pattern.

That’s all for this week. Catch you again next week 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, December 9

by | Dec 8, 2013 | Links

Hi all – welcome to another weeks worth of Java desktop links! Enjoy 🙂

  • This week Scene Builder 2.0 was open sourced as part of the OpenJFX project. This means that it is now possible for people to learn from the Scene Builder code base, and who knows, maybe propose improvements.
  • Speaking of Scene Builder, Sven Reimers has two posts (so far) about embedding JavaFX Scene Builder 2.0 ea in NetBeans. The first post covers embedding the FXML visual renderer, and the second post covers embedding the hierarchy viewer.
  • Tom Schindl has a blog post introducing his new project: SWT running on top of  JavaFX. As he says in the post, “SWT on FX is an SWT implementation which instead of using the native widget it use JavaFX controls under the covers (similar to what SWT on Swing did some years ago).” At present it is more of a research project and is not yet available, although Tom is looking for expressions of interest in the technology so that he can develop a business plan around it.
  • ControlsFX 8.0.3 was released this week, including a new PopOver control, new CheckComboBox/CheckListView/CheckTreeView controls, a new Borders API and a number of updates to SpreadsheetView. Also, the sample application was made more generic to allow for third party projects (such as JFXtras) to make use of it rather than have to develop their own sample application. Other users are more than welcome to use it as the base for their own application.
  • Jens Deters has set up a website for his JavaFX projects (including adm4ee, a “management tool to ease the daily business of Java EE Application Server admins”, and FontAwesomeFX).
  • Gerrit Grunwald has announced that his Enzo project has moved from Github to Bitbucket, and that the build structure has been cleaned up.
  • Bertrand Goetzmann has announced PlantUMLFX, which is “a JavaFX 2 application implemented with a single GroovyFX script, PlantUMLFX.groovy, that allows you to generate UML diagrams with the help of PlantUML.”
  • The tomoTaka blog has a post about how to add drag and drop support for files being dropped on to a JavaFX TreeView control.
  • Sean Phillips has a post rebutting an earlier blog post by Yakov Fain arguing about whether Swing should be killed to force JavaFX usage?

Catch you all next week!