Today I have an interview with Carl Dea. For those new to this series, here are the people who have been interviewed so far:

Let’s get into the interview! Enjoy :-)

8c99d2a4-9261-4f27-8222-b406c7eefafc_400x400[1]Hi there. Thanks for taking the time to do this quick interview. Can you please introduce yourself?
 Hi, I am Carl Dea. I want to first thank you and the other JavaFX teams at Oracle for not only building a great graphics toolkit but helping grow the JavaFX community. I work for Objective Solutions Inc. as a software engineer & UI developer by day and an avid JavaFX enthusiast by night. I and others (Gerrit Grunwald, Mark Heckler, Jose Pereda and Sean Philips) have recently finished authoring the book titled ‘JavaFX 8 Introduction by Example‘ by Apress publishing.

What was your goal in writing the book?
The book is the second edition of the JavaFX 2.0 Intro by Example book. JavaFX 8 Introduction by Example aims at providing easy to follow examples while introducing new features in JavaFX 8 and learning the new Java 8 language features. Of course given the huge feature set of JavaFX 8 and Java 8 language features the book couldn’t cover everything. But hopefully, this will allow readers to quickly get up to speed and begin to build rich client-side applications in JavaFX.

Is this your first time presenting at JavaOne, or are you a JavaOne veteran?
Yes, this is my first time speaking at JavaOne. So, hopefully everything goes as planned. Not to jump the subject but I am reminded of a a funny comic strip depicting what could go wrong during a presentation:

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What are you going to talk about at JavaOne?
 I’ve been working on a talk for JavaOne regarding a live editor tool for developers to quickly prototype JavaFX UIs and visualizations. The session is titled  JavaFX Coding Playground (JavaFX-Based Live Editor Tool). The tool will allow developers to execute code without the need of compiling Java code by using the new JavaScript engine Nashorn in JDK 8. In the session attendees will learn how to code UIs with JavaScript, FXML, JavaFX CSS styling. Also, they will learn how to use external libraries such as JFXtras, Enzo and your open source project that you started called ControlsFX.

Do you have any big announcements or releases planned leading up to (or at) JavaOne? Can you give any hints? ;-)
The JavaFX Coding Playground (Live editor) tool to be demonstrated in the talk FX Playground will soon be open sourced and should be available before the talk (end of Sept.). The public will get a chance to perform a git clone to download the source code to be built and executed. Binary distributions will come later.

Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?
Yes,

I wanted to also point out that FX Playground’s features that I mentioned earlier doesn’t stop there! It has new support for many other languages (not just JavaScript (Nashorn)).

What are all languages that you currently support?
JavaScript (Nashorn), Groovy, GroovyFX, Python (Jython), Ruby (JRuby), Clojure, and Scala.

Why are you supporting so many languages?
I realized something about the software programming world is that it is made up of people with different backgrounds (programming languages). Having these different backgrounds I often sense programmers tend to be more comfortable with certain languages than others (dogma). So, given that these popular languages sit on top of the JVM (based on JSR 223) the developer can access and reap all the benefits of the JavaFX APIs. Therefore, anyone proficient in any of the languages mentioned above will be able to quickly prototype user interfaces, animations or any other type of visualization using JavaFX.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to answer these questions! All the best for your JavaOne talks!
Thank you Jonathan. It was my pleasure. I wish you the best on your talks also!