• JavaFX 2.2 build 8, and Scene Builder 1.0 build 38 are now available for download for testing.
• If you’re new to Scene Builder, check out the developer preview of the ‘getting started with JavaFX Scene Builder‘.
• Eric Bruno has an article up on Dr. Dobbs about the Scene Builder application that was recently made available as a developer preview.
• Patrick Martin has been very busy working on a new tool called Data Explorer, or Dex for short. This tool allows for data import and visualisation, and looks like it has huge potential. Check out the link, if even just for the screenshots (many of which use external non-JavaFX libraries).
• Gerrit Grunwald has blogged about exporting content from Adobe Fireworks CS6, and using the content in JavaFX (by copying the provided SVG, and slightly modifying the provided CSS).
• For those that couldn’t attend Stephen Chin’s talks at JustJava Brazil, he has now posted the translated slide decks online for you to check out.
• Thierry Wasyl has put up part two and three of his posts on his TweetWallFX application. Part two covers the creation of the business objects and use of FXML and controller classes, whilst part three covers transitions and animations, as well as tips on using the FXMLLoader class.
• Anton Epple continues to refine his JavaFX pinball game, adding features such as ball tracking (that is, zooming in and translating the view to follow the ball around the screen) and custom pinball node renderers. He also demonstrates the improved NetBeans support for Scene Builder that is coming in NetBeans 7.2.
• Will Hoover has posted sample code to create dialogs in JavaFX.
• Thomas Bolz has posted an applet version of his SudokuFX application which you can play online.
• Mark Anro Silva has posted code online to show how easy it is to create a loading indicator in JavaFX.

Catch you again next week

• JavaFX 2.1 has barely been released and already we’ve got builds of JavaFX 2.2 available. In fact, we’re already up to build 08 of JavaFX 2.2, and build 37 of Scene Builder 1.0.
• I released a tool (built initially by Amy Fowler) that we use inside Oracle called Scenic View. I am now working with Ander Ruiz on an updated release which includes a number of new features. You can see a screenshot at the end of this post of the new version (which is still in active development (both the UI and the functionality)).
• Michael Heinrichs, a fellow team members in the JavaFX team at Oracle, was interviewed at JFokus, and the video is now online.
• There was quite a bit of noise regarding people getting JavaFX up and running on the Raspberry Pi device.
• Weiqi Gao has got a very in-depth article up online about his experiments with JavaFX 3D scenes.
• Tom Schindl has noted that he is seeing improvements in Netbeans JavaFX support that already exist in his e(fx)clipse project (but that it is great that his ‘competition’ is improving functionality).
• Java_Buddy has blogged about how to get javadoc documentation to appear in NetBeans when working with JavaFX API.
• Thierry Wasyl has started work on building an application called TweetWallFX. He already has a blog post detailing the construction of the UI, as well as a YouTube video of the application.
• Narayan Maharjan has blogged about JavaFX Drag and Drop support in ListView.
• Geertjan Wielenga has blogged about using JavaFX charts in place of the usual charts in VisualVM.
• Geertjan has also recently presented on using JavaFX in pluggable corporate applications.
• Stephen Chin was at JavaOne Hyderabad as well, where he presented on JavaFX and HTML 5.
• Mohammed Sanaulla has blogged about how he uses JavaFX charts in Swing applications. In a separate post, he also posts part one about developing a simple Todo application using JavaFX, Java and MongoDB.
• Dustin Marx has written a JavaFX-Based SimpleDateFormat demonstrator.
• Nitin Gupta at e-zest has an article up on ahead of time compilation for JavaFX 2.0 applications.
• Anton Epple has added motion blur to his physics-based pinball game.

Scenic View Sneak-peak

Finally, here is the current, in-development version of Scenic View that I am working on with Ander Ruiz. I will release an updated version of Scenic View as soon as all the features are in place.

That’s that for another week. Catch you all next week

Oh – by the way – if you’re at JavaOne Hyderabad next week and you spot me, come up and say hello. I really love chatting to people, but I can’t pick the JavaFX fans from the Java EE people….and I have nothing to say to Java EE people

• JavaFX 2.1 was released this week. Along with the release, the JavaFX team included release notes, and a huge number of new articles on the JavaFX documentation site.
• I interviewed Peter Zhelezniakov regarding his work in the JavaFX team on the WebView component.
• Angela Caicedo has released part three of her video series on building your first JavaFX application.
• Kai Wähner asked (and then attempted to answer) ‘When to use JavaFX 2 instead of HTML5 for a Rich Internet Application (RIA)?’
• Andy Moncsek has blogged about how to use JavaFX 2.1 from a local maven repository (on OS X).
• Jeff Friesen has got an article up on JavaWorld about ‘pixel graphics and JavaFX‘.
• Roberto Marquez has explored the animation features in JavaFX, and has a post up discussing the early stages of using these to create a game.

Catch you all next week!

• There is a heap of discussion and review requests going on over at the openjfx-dev mailing list – if you are interested you should consider joining. Some topics of interest to readers include talk of adding a canvas node to JavaFX, to allow for immediate mode painting (e.g. Java2D), deployment ideas, and requests for a CSS object model. Also, if you subscribe to this list, you get notification of all changesets to the public code, so you’ll get a heads-up on what is coming in JavaFX 2.1 and JavaFX 2.2.
• Jeff Friesen has got up on his soapbox and posted an article over at JavaWorld asking people to please stop the Java desktop FUD.
• Jim Weaver has posted about best practices for JavaFX 2 enterprise applications.
• Terrence Barr notes something odd: client apps are becoming sexy again! He has a heap of links for you to peruse.
• Stephen Chin and Luc Duponcheel recently presented about using JavaFX with Scala. You can check out their slides if you’re interested.
• Carl Dea has updated his JavaFX game tutorial to include a link to his source code at Github.
• Adam Bien has a code snippet to show how to set the main Stage of a JavaFX application to be transparent.
• Geertjan Wielenga has two posts this week. Firstly, he asks whether JavaFX can be used for corporate desktop applications. Secondly, he asks for someone to step up and provide a JavaFX-based music sheet component.

That’s all for this week. Feel free to send me a link if you think you’ve done something that your peers may be interested in. Catch you all next week

• Jasper Potts was interviewed by the Java Spotlight podcast whilst we were in Japan. He talks extensively about the recent developer preview release of Scene Builder.
• Adam Bien has blogged about building JavaFX 2 using Maven 3.
• Tom Schindl has two blog posts up regarding JavaFX and Eclipse xtend being a perfect match, and a sensationally perfect match
• Software4Java.com has got three interesting blog posts about creating custom CSS styling for Mac OS and iOS. This is very cool and I would love to see more people working together in a project to create ‘native’ looks for JavaFX.
• Jason Lee will show you how to get Java 7, NetBeans, and JavaFX 2 running on Mac OS X. Well written instructions to get you on your way.
• Carl Dea has posted part two of his JavaFX 2 game tutorial.
• Sai Dandem of e-Zest blogs about creating a custom calendar control and how to use JavaFX animations to transition regions. (It’s all about clipping). Another blog entry about creating a custom JavaFX TableColumn allowing you to adjust column widths using a percentage similar to a Html table tag element.
• Anton Epple has created an A Hello World example in JavaFX and JBox2D. He then has a follow-up blog entry that goes on to demonstrate a way to apply a custom renderer onto nodes called a NodeProvider interface.  Another post talks about adding custom components to FXML using BuilderFactory. He then begins experimenting with adding extensibility to the FX Experience tools application, which he then updated in a separate post. Finally, he talks about using Scene Builder to create the desired node designs that he can then use in his pinball application.
• introjava posts a very nice example of how to create a ribbon component similar to Microsoft Office applications using JavaFX.

Catch you all next week!

• Richard Bair (chief architect for the Client Java Platform at Oracle) happily shares the good news about the very cool Scene Builder tool announced during the keynote at JavaOne Tokyo Japan. Here is Oracle’s official site to download the preview release.
• William Antonio discusses his first impressions of the latest preview release of the Scene Builder Tool.
• Halfway around the globe Jonathan Giles managed to present at JavaOne and interview Java Champions Jim Weaver and Stephen Chin. (Jonathan’s from the future)
• Manoj Debnath blogs about Animation in JavaFX vs. Flash. Manoj only details JavaFX 2.x and mentions little of Adobe Flash to contrast the two technologies.
• Java Champion Joshua Marinacci asks kindly if you are a GUI designer or Developer to please take Leonardo Sketch out for a spin (test). Leo Sketch is a full featured vector drawing tool very much like a scene builder tool. I believe the new JavaFX 2 FXML export feature may be available (ask him). It is a great tool for mocking screens, presentations, and more.
• A nice book review by Jason Lee on the recently released book “Pro JavaFX 2: A Definitive Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology”
• Java-Buddy (mystery person) creates easy to follow tutorials. Java-Buddy begins to create an app to free draw using the mouse, and a set of tutorials to transform shapes using rotation, translation, scale, and shear.
• The JavaFX teams released a recent developer preview build of JavaFX 2.2 build b03. It’s nice to see it available for all the major platforms (Windows, MacOS, and Linux). Be on the lookout for the release notes for all the hard work that has been done.
• Narayan has blogged about form field validation using CSS styling.
• introjava (aka Gregg Setzer) has posted a Ribbon control to his blog. It would be nice to see this in JFXtras at some point soon!

Well, that’s it for this week I hope you enjoyed the links (I sure did). Keep up the great work! I want to thank Jonathan for allowing me to share with you all about the possibilities on the Java platform especially on the desktop.

-Carl

(Note from Jonathan: Thanks to Carl for stepping up to the plate for this week and next week. You really should consider buying his book).

• JavaFX 2.1 build b19 Developer Preview Download is available!
• Stephen Chin has released his slide presentations from the 33rd Degree Conference. One of the slide presentations discusses developing JavaFX 2.x applications using the Scala language titled “JavaFX 2 and Scala – Like Milk and Cookies“. The other slide presentation covers the development of cleaner APIs and better UIs on the JavaFX 2.x platform using the Visage language.
• (Late breaking link from Jonathan): Speaking of Stephen and Jim, they have just announced that they are joining the Java envangelism team at NASA Oracle. Stephen has blogged about this both on, and fortunately after, April Fools Day. I’ve got an interview lined up with them that I’ll publish here at FX Experience in the coming weeks.
• Chika Okereke has blogged about a PDF to JavaFXML conversion using a technique which applies CSS styles to JavaFX 2.x graph nodes dynamically using the @FXML annotation.
• Bertrand Goetzmann has shown off a screen cast demonstrating an application he is working on called Metaphora (source code). He has made use of GroovyFX and Netty which are two powerful combinations (A graphics DSL handling file transfers with non blocking I/O).
• Jonathan Giles has continued with his series of interviews with key software engineers at Oracle. Jonathan has interviewed Jeff Hoffman and David Grieve. Jeff is a lead user experience developer who has the very huge responsibility of the end-to-end deployment experience. David is an engineer on the UI controls team who is (a hero imo) behind JavaFX’s CSS support.
• The Java Spotlight episode 76 podcast has interviewed authors James Weaver , Weiqi Gao , Stephen Chin , Dean Iverson, and Johan Vos (The Dream Team) to talk about their recently published book, Pro JavaFX 2. This interview highlighted separate areas of the book which were crafted by each individual author’s unique expertise.
• Also, at Java.net Johan Vos explains about ways to handle dependency management using Maven when using the DataFX artifacts. He also asks the community for feedback on the preferred way involving JavaFX. I’d like to see Gradle in the picture with transitive dependencies set (sorry couldn’t resist).
• Dan Zwolenski blogs about Spring Security and JavaFX. He shows you how to integrate the Spring framework to authenticate and authorize access in a JavaFX application.
• I recently blogged about the creation of a spaceship game using JavaFX 2.x. as Part 1 of a series of tutorials which will incrementally take you through the game development process. Here I basically demo the way I want the spaceship to navigate.
• The Griffon Framework has now released the JavaFX plugin which allows writing Griffon JavaFX applications by using GroovyFX to code views. Griffon also has a new JavaFX archetype to create a simple JavaFX Griffon application in seconds.
• Java-Buddy (a blogger whose name is still a mystery to me) has created quick and simple tutorials on how-to execute JavaScript in WebView from Java code and how-to embed Google Maps in JavaFX WebView.
• Anton Epple blogs about a nice looking JavaFX 2.x version of the popular game Tetris.  I hope to see him make it even better. He mentions about some audio issues. Hopefully he can file the issue on Jira so that it can be followed up.
• Wichit Sombat creates a bunch of videos this week where he walks you through tutorials on How-to create bouncing icons, a docking application, setting up IntelliJ IDEA for JavaFX, and getting started on JavaFX on Ubuntu.
• Tom Schindl publishes his slide presentation on e(fx)clipse, the Eclipse Tooling and Runtime for JavaFX.
• Dilip has a very cool blog entry and tutorial that will help you get started with JavaFX with JBox2D (the very cool physics library).

That’s it for this week everyone. Keep up the great work and keep those creative juices flowing!

• Build 18 of the JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview release is now available for download. We are getting a long way down the release cycle now.
• The Asia-Pacific Virtual Developer Day is coming up tomorrow. Attend to learn about JavaFX and what is new in Java 7. I’ll be there providing support.
• Angela Caicedo has posted a video about how to get started using the Scene Builder tool. This is your first chance to see it in action.
  
• Tom Schindl has released e(fx)clipse 0.0.13, which includes a bunch of new stuff.
• I started a series of interviews with people inside and outside of Oracle who are all members of the JavaFX community. In the past week, I published interviews with book author Carl Dea, and SteelSeriesFX developer Gerrit Grunwald. I have more interviews to publish in the coming months.
• Speaking of Carl Dea, he was also interviewed by Nicolas Lorain about his recently released JavaFX 2 book.
• Eric Bruno has blogged about simple searching in JavaFX (using a TextField to filter a ListView).
• Hugues Johnson has created a file browser demo application. I would like to add that he says the sample in the TreeItem JavaDoc (which I wrote) builds up the entire directory structure recursively at startup. This is incorrect – the sample actually builds the tree structure on-demand.
• Dan Zwolenski has published three posts this week. Firstly, about adding database support to a JavaFX application, secondly about adding search support, and finally about software logging.
• introjava blogged about working with JavaFX 2 layouts, and also working with JavaFX 2 linear gradients.
• Josh Marinacci has split out his AppBundler project out into its own Github repository. AppBundler is an Ant task for packaging up desktop Java apps as native executables. He mentioned to me that he is on the lookout for contributors who could help with JavaFX, OpenJDK embedding,  and Linux support.

For the next two weeks I’ll be in Japan, but these posts will be continuing thanks to a guest poster I’ll introduce next week.

• The JavaOne call for papers has opened up, and closes mid-April. It is time to get your sessions submitted! Hopefully I’ll get to go along again and will see you all there again (and continue the tradition of the Java Desktop lunch).
• It’s not until late April, but you’re not going to want to miss the introduction to the JavaFX Scene Builder tool, being given by Nicolas Lorain (PM for JavaFX) and Jasper Potts (Developer Experience Architect for JavaFX). This is at the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group, but as always you can attend virtually and join in the live webcast.
• Michael Heinrichs, a developer in the JavaFX team at Oracle, has explored the JavaFX CSS functionality, something he admits he was not involved in developing, and comes away pleasantly surprised by how well it works. Considering this is something my team ‘owns’, I’m very pleased he is happy (but all praise should be directed at David Grieve, the long-standing owner of all CSS functionality in JavaFX).
• Kumanivasar Srin has posted a JEP over at the OpenJDK to add support into Java to make it support loading JavaFX applications without any special compilation needed. This would be a great thing to get into Java in my humble opinion.
• Willy Raharjo has posted two blog posts about JavaFX and Slackware. The first post is a tutorial on running JavaFX apps on top of Slackware. The second post discusses integrating JavaFX into Netbeans on top of Slackware.
• PFGrid has released a first version of their (commercial) PFGrid FX toolkit, which at this stage contains just one control: a ‘rotator’ control.
• I did a blog post introducing the new ComboBox control in JavaFX 2.1. In general it should be a very useful control in your toolbox.

That’s that for this week. Catch you again next week.

• Build 16 of JavaFX 2.1 Developer Preview is now out. Go get it and give it a good test!
• Jasper Potts converted the animate.css project to JavaFX, providing 52 ready to use animations for you to use in your applications.
• Michael Heinrichs has blogged about how to create a sprite animation with JavaFX. The way in which he does it is quite interesting, and well worth reading to understand this area of the JavaFX API.
• Steve Northover has updated the instructions for building OpenJFX.
• Angela Caicedo has put up part two of her ‘building your first JavaFX application using NetBeans 7.1‘ YouTube video.
• The Pro JavaFX 2 book was released this week. I read the first edition and it covered everything I needed to know before joining the JavaFX team, so it is well recommended.
• Johan Vos has blogged about the availability of RedFX for JavaFX 2, and has a sample application showing how to use it.
• Tom Schindl has announced that the next release of e(fx)clipse will contain improved OSGi support. This makes it easier to use JavaFX within Eclipse views.
• Jeff Friesen has written a three-part series about ‘Practical JavaFX 2‘, where he goes about porting a Swing application to JavaFX.
• Narayan Maharjan, after being prompted in a forum thread, has blogged about how to go about skinning the JavaFX Tooltip control.
• Andy Moncsek has blogged about how to use his open source JacpFX framework.
• Christian Schudt has blogged about his improvements to the JavaFX TreeView control to allow for populating it using just a List of items, rather than having to create TreeItem instances. This is something I’ll likely add to the DataFX project in the coming weeks as it seems like a useful thing to have.
• Brian Schlining has created a ScalaFX version of the GroovyFX demo application.

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