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!
As Richard mentioned recently, he had the honor to be the first official speaker at the first JavaFX user group meeting. You can read the slides from this presentation, and now I have decided to post the video here for those of you wanting to watch it but may have missed the live streaming.
Next up on January 13 is Amy Fowler, who will be talking about layout secrets in JavaFX. Note that this presentation is not at Google – this time it is being held at Sun. As with the first talk, you can also watch the presentation live, and participate both in the chat room, and also pose questions that may be answered by Amy at the talk.
Here we go again with another week of the best and most important JavaFX links that we could find on the net. We hope you enjoy, and find them useful.
After a successful first presentation with Richard Bair at the Silicon Valley JavaFX users group, next up to bat is Amy Fowler. She’ll be presenting about layout secrets in JavaFX on January 13. Note that the venue has changed – it is now being hosted at Sun. As with the first presentation, you don’t have to be physically in California to attend – video is broadcast live, and there is an associated chat room. You can find me, as well as a number of other JavaFX developers, in there during the presentation.
Dean Iverson posted a very interesting article investigating how to create custom controls in JavaFX, making use of Caspian code for colors and state transitions (i.e. subtle animations). The only downside is that we’ve changed how things work for JavaFX 1.3, which should make this kind of thing much easier.
Congratulations goes to Jeff Frieson for winning the latest JavaFX coding competition. This months theme was ‘holiday’, and you can see the winning entry at JFXStudio. Next months competition will be announced on new years day.
Speaking of Jeff, he has posted an article discussing how to play with perspectives in JavaFX to attain various effects. You can also find a lot more of this kind of material in the ‘Pro JavaFX Platform’ book published a few months ago.
If you’re wanting to display PDF’s from within JavaFX, today’s your luck day, as JPedalFX is a LGPL-licensed JavaFX PDF viewer. I’m not sure what is going on under the hood, but I’m guessing it’s probably a wrapper around a Swing-based PDF viewer. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but just keep in mind that this limits the portability of your JavaFX app (both to mobile/tv devices, as well as to the prism graphics stack).
Dean Iverson has just now blogged about creating custom Caspian controls in JavaFX. As soon as I saw his link run up on Twitter I fired it around my team mates in the JavaFX controls team (yes, we’re still working, and in fact we’re all working precisely on what Dean is talking about). We all like what he is doing, and with JavaFX 1.3 coming up we hope to make this kind of thing far easier.
From Deans blog post:
Creating custom controls in JavaFX is not difficult. Creating custom controls that fit nicely with the default Caspian theme, with its pervasive use of gradients and animation, is a little trickier. This is only because the utility classes and methods that make it simple lie buried within com.sun packages that are not publicly documented. A little digging reveals a few gems that can be used to make your controls fit right in with the core JavaFX controls.
So, if you’re keen right now to create great looking skins in JavaFX using the Caspian technology that shipped in JavaFX 1.2, give Deans blog post a read.
Welcome back to JavaFX links of the week. There have been a few interesting bits of news this week, so let’s get right into it.
This week saw the final release of NetBeans 6.8. This release includes improvements in JavaFX support. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think of the improvements.
Stuart Marks, one of our fellow team mates in the JavaFX controls team, continues his series on ‘that infernal scene graph warning message‘. It’s a must read if you want a glimpse into the thought process that goes on within the JavaFX team.
A new JavaFX book appeared on the scene this week somewhat unexpectedly (i.e. no one at fxexperience.com knew about it, which is odd given we’ve been involved in the reviewing of many of the earlier JavaFX books). The book is titled ‘ JavaFX Special Effects: Taking Java RIA to the Extreme with Animation, Multimedia, and Game Elements’, and Jim Weaver recently spoke to the author, Lucas Jordan.
Alex Ruiz has created a new JavaFX Maven plugin. Give it a whirl and let Alex know what you think.
That’s us for another week. If you know of any JavaFX news that you think is worthy of being included here, please email me and let me know. Catch you all in a weeks time!
Welcome to the second week of our JavaFX links of the week posts. This week perhaps the biggest news was the release of more details about what is (potentially – things may of course change) coming up in JavaFX 1.3. From the feedback I’ve personally received from people, it seems that you’re all quite excited about the new features and controls, which is of course great to hear.
Please, as always, you can email me your links that you want covered. We want to make sure we draw attention to the best things happening in the JavaFX world each week, and sometimes we need your help to find them.
Chris Wright and Jim Weaver continue their series of posts covering what is new in JavaFX 1.2, this week focusing on the new JavaFX charts API.
Whilst NetBeans 6.7 doesn’t support automatically formatting JavaFX script, NetBeans 6.8 apparently will. Whilst we wait for the final release of that, there is a workaround available for NetBeans 6.7 if you’re really desperate for automatic code formatting.
Mitch Pronschinskeasks Max Katz (of Exadel JavaFX plugin for Eclipse fame) if there is a lack of advertising for JavaFX.
Stephen Chin has blogged about his Devoxx 2009 talks. He provides links to the videos on parleys.com, which is a paid site, although over time the videos will become available for free.
