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.
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 21, 2014 | Links
It’s one week until JavaOne kicks off – I can’t wait to get over there and to catch up with a bunch of you. This week there are a bunch of good links too, so enjoy! 🙂
That’s all folks. If everything goes to plan, the next post will be done from San Francisco sometime around the start of JavaOne. For those that are attending – safe travels and I look forward to seeing you there. For those that are not, follow along on twitter 🙂
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 18, 2014 | Interviews
Today I have an interview with Sean Phillips. For those new to this series, here are the people who have been interviewed so far:
Hi there. Thanks for taking the time to do this quick interview. Can you please introduce yourself?
Hey I am Sean Phillips and I live near Washington DC, USA. I work for a.i. solutions inc and we are a major NASA corporate partner. Additionally I am the founder of the free open source JavaFX 3D library F(X)yz. I received a 2013 Duke’s Choice award for my GEONS Ground Support System software.
Recently I contributed, along with Gerrit Grunwald, Mark Heckler, Jose Pereda and Carl Dea, to the book titled ‘JavaFX 8 Introduction by Example‘ by Apress publishing.
Is this your first time presenting at JavaOne, or are you a JavaOne veteran?
This will be my third JavaOne and second presenting. I suppose that makes me a veteran… I still have a free t-shirt with SUN logos on them from my first JavaOne. I presented at several sessions last year and was extremely fortunate to present live during the community keynote.
What was presenting at the keynote like compared to the technical sessions?
Well we had rehearsal and practiced our timing the night before. Henrik Stahl was the host for my portion and he’s great. Really sharp and quick on his feet up there. I was presenting NASA mission software so I thought I would have the coolest section but I was bookended by James Gosling’s Underwater Robots and Aditya Gupta’s exploding flying Minecraft Pigs. I had no chance! How can you compete with that??
What are you going to talk about at JavaOne this year?
This year I have a mix of sessions, ranging from JavaFX 3D to Lessons Learned in Mission Critical systems.
I am excited by my NASA Software Development on the Eights session where a team of my colleagues and I will be discussing and demonstrating some of the software we develop for our NASA missions.
What type of missions are you working on?
The team I am bringing and my company a.i. solutions provide support for a long list of missions and launches ranging from James Webb Space Telescope to the International Space Station. A strong cross-section of those missions will be discussed at JavaOne by us this year.
Do you have any big announcements or releases planned leading up to (or at) JavaOne? Can you give any hints?
No hints, I will just tell you. Jason Pollastrini (@jdub1581, Co-founder of F(X)yz) and I have just open sourced our JavaFX 3D library. Unfortunately Jason couldn’t make JavaOne this year but I will be demonstrating the new features that provide a lot of support that JavaFX 3D does have within its base packages. We are really proud of the work and we moving ahead towards making everything from better 3D data visualizations to all the basics of a 3D Game engine. A shout out to Jason: He’s really bumped the project forward. Anybody on the west coast in need of a graphics/3D guy he’s fantastic!
Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?
Find me at the Taylor Street cafe after 2pm!
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 16, 2014 | Interviews
Today I have an interview with Hendrik Ebbers. For those new to this series, here are the people who have been interviewed so far:
Hi there. Thanks for taking the time to do this quick interview. Can you please introduce yourself?
Sure 🙂
I’m Hendrik Ebbers and live in Dortmund, Germany and work for Canoo Engineering AG. In addition I’m the lead of JUG Dortmund. My main focus is primarily in the areas of JavaFX, Middleware and DevOps. I have a website (www.guigarage.com) on that I try to blog about UI related topics. In the last time most of the post are about JavaFX and enterprise development. If you are interested in this you should visit my blog or follow me 🙂 (@hendrikEbbers)
For JavaOne 2014 JavaFX is my core topic. As a Featured Speaker I will have 6 talks at JavaOne this year. Next to this Oracle Press released my “Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls” book this summer.
Is this your first time presenting at JavaOne, or are you a JavaOne veteran?
No to both 🙂
I was speaking at JavaOne last year the first time. I had 3 talks about JavaFX. It was an awesome week and I can’t wait to be there again.
What are you going to talk about at JavaOne?
As already said my main topic will be JavaFX. I’ve prepared some talks that introduce different subtopics like JavaFX enterprise development or styling with CSS. A complete list of all my talks can be found at my blog: http://www.guigarage.com/2014/08/javaone-2014-sessions/
In addition I try to give some previews and sneak peek of my talks at guigarage. Currently there are two previews:
http://www.guigarage.com/2014/09/javaone-2014-preview/
http://www.guigarage.com/2014/09/javaone-preview-enterprise-javafx/
Do you have any big announcements or releases planned leading up to (or at) JavaOne? Can you give any hints? 😉
Let’s start talking about releases. We plan to release DataFX 8 at JavaOne. With version 8 DataFX will contain 5 modules: core, data reader, flow, injection & web socket. We have a DataFX 8 talk at JavaOne in that we want to introduce all the features and show some demos. I hope that the JavaFX community will like what we did the last year.
In addition I created a collection of small but helpful JavaFX modules. This set of modules is called “Guigarage JavaFX Collections“ and I will release a first version at JavaOne. In all of my talks at minimum one of the modules is used to code some cool demos. I don’t want to talk to much about the content of this project because I will introduce it in my talks. But I can say that there are modules for animations, styling, custom controls and some other core topics.
Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?
Come to JavaOne! It’s the biggest and coolest Java Conference in the world. Oh, and visit my talks 😀
For all the people who can’t visit JavaOne I plan to release all demos and slides directly after the conference. In addition I’m currently writing some descriptions for the modules of the “Guigarage JavaXF Collections” set that will be released on guigarge after JavaOne.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to answer these questions! All the best for your JavaOne talks!
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 14, 2014 | Links
Two weeks until JavaOne – now I’m starting to get excited (and also overwhelmed by how much preparation I still have to do!). On with the links! 🙂
JavaFX
- Danno Ferrin has announced the release of version 8.1 of the Maven JavaFX Plugin.
- Jens Deters has released MQTT.fx 0.0.9.
- Vinumeris has announced that an alpha version of Lighthouse is now open source. Lighthouse is a “decentralised, peer to peer crowdfunding application that uses the smart contracts features of the Bitcoin protocol. It lets you create projects and pledge to those projects.” They have also announced the open sourcing of UpdateFX, which is a “small, simple automatic online update framework for JavaFX applications.”
- I published another JavaOne interview, this time with Johan Vos.
- I posted a quick book review of the Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls book that was recently published.
- Gerrit Grunwald has posted about another ‘Friday Fun Component’ he has built: a ‘minimal clock‘.
- Canoo staff have posted video summaries of what they will be presenting at JavaOne, including Dierk Koenig, Michael Heinrichs, and Hendrik Ebbers.
- With JavaOne now less than two weeks away, people are continuing to post on their sessions, as well as sessions they are looking forward to. Some links I’ve found include: Hendrik Ebbers talking about his sessions (it’s a different video than above), Hendrik Ebbers giving a sneak peak at his ‘Enterprise JavaFX’ session demonstration, and Michael Hoffer has a post summarising his sessions.
- This week I came across FXDesktopSearch, a desktop search application written in Java / JavaFX.
Catch you all next week.
by Jonathan Giles | Sep 13, 2014 | Controls, General
Hendrik Ebbers was generous enough to arrange for a hard copy of his new book, Mastering JavaFX 8 Controls, to be sent to my place, so the least I can do is post a mini review of the book. I have now read the book cover to cover and I think that it is a very good book for people wanting to learn more about the controls that ship in JavaFX 8, and also for people wanting to learn more about how to build custom controls specific to their use cases.
Reviewing a book like this is difficult for me as I have lived and breathed JavaFX UI controls for over five years now, so it is hard for me to gauge whether the book is detailed enough for people newer to the subject. My gut feeling is that the book could do with more text to describe concepts, but in general I think most readers should be able to follow along without a problem. In reading the book I made a few notes that I have also passed on to Hendrik, to help improve future editions of the book (which I hope there are as JavaFX API evolves quite rapidly).
The early chapters of the book give a good introduction to the basics of JavaFX. The middle section gives a good overview of the existing JavaFX UI controls, as well as interesting topics such as Swing and SWT integration, and styling UI controls. Unfortunately, whilst the first two sections feel like they go at a good pace, the final section of the book seems to be over too quickly – there is only one chapter on creating custom controls, which is unfortunate given the subtitle of the book is “Create Custom JavaFX Controls for Cross-Platform Applications”. It would be nice to see the final section of the book expanded to fill multiple chapters in future editions – this way it could feel less cramped and the book could easily become the go-to reference for how to create custom controls.
One nice aspect of the book is the interviews with members of the community (including myself). I enjoyed reading the interviews, but I wished for more and for them to be longer! 🙂 There are a lot of interesting members of the community who can provide a bunch of detailed insight and explanations, so I hope future editions expand on the interviews.
Overall I think that this is a great book for people interested in working with JavaFX UI controls, and shows great promise for future editions if some of the kinks above are worked out. Despite my negative points, I recommend this book to people who are serious about wanting to get to know JavaFX UI controls in greater depth.
