JavaFX

• It’s another week, so another developer preview release of JavaFX 2.1 is out for Linux, Mac OS and Windows. This week we are up to build 10.
• With the availability of JavaFX 2.1 developer preview builds for Linux, a number of people and news websites covered this. For example: Weigi Gao, Jaxenter, and H online.
• Jasper Potts has put up two blogs posts here at FX Experience. The first post discusses his work on extending the PathBuilder class to include more convenience methods, and secondly he has a post about extending the charts code shipped with JavaFX to apply curve fitting.
• Speaking of the builder classes shipped with JavaFX, Michael Heinrichs, a member of the JavaFX team, has put up a post about the advantages of the JavaFX builder APIs.
• Kevin Farnham put up a blog post over at Java.net about getting started with the JavaFX 2.1 developer preview on Linux.
• Dustin Marx talks about the @DefaultProperty annotation used in the JavaFX APIs, and what this means for you when building user interfaces with FXML.
• The GroovyFX library now has a new website.
• Thierry Janaudy has a blog post showing how to put a pie chart inside a TableView using a custom cell factory, whilst programming in Scala.
• Sébastien Bordes has a post detailing how to build and package JavaFX application with Maven.
• Narayan has blogged about the ‘include’ and ‘define’ tags in FXML.
• Yet another DatePicker control has appeared, pushing my count to at least five such controls. This week it belongs to Altuğ Uzunali.
• Andrew Krizhanovsky let me know about his wikokit project, which he describes as a “Machine-readable Wiktionary with GUI now ported to JavaFX 2.0. This version contains huge drop-down list of available languages.”

These conclusions are equally difficult. The core message is always the same: I hope you enjoy what I just linked to, and I hope it was good enough to see you again in a weeks time (where hopefully my introductions and conclusions are slightly more considered!)

• JavaFX 2.1 developer preview build 09 has been released. For the first time, this release includes support for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. You can read a bit more about this here.
  
• Amy Fowler’s “Interface Layout with JavaFX 2.0” JavaOne talk is now available on Parleys.
• Tom Schindl has created a SVG to FXML converter, which he plans to include in a future release of his e(fx)clipse project.
• Yet another JavaFX calendar control has been developed, this time by Christian Schudt. The control looks very nice and should be very useful to people needing this kind of functionality in their applications.
• Chika Okereke has put up three blogs posts about the JavaFX PDF support. The first two posts are about the NetBeans support, and then news about the latest release containing a few improvements.
• Dustin Marx has two blog posts this week. Firstly, he demonstrates FXML by porting one of his previous applications to use it, and secondly he reviews the “JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by Example” 2.0 book by Carl Dea.
• Thierry Janaudy has put up a blog post showing how to use the JavaFX TableView control in a GUI using Scala.
• Toni Epple has reviewed the JavaFX support in the latest 7.1 release of NetBeans.
• Sai Predeep Dandem has blogged about creating sliding effects (like those seen in the TitledPane control).
• Jim Weaver has put out a sample app that will be getting discussed in the upcoming Pro JavaFX 2.0 book.
• William Antônio Siqueira has blogged about the DataFX project, demonstrating how easy it is to get data into a JavaFX TableView control.

Catch you all in a weeks time.

• A new JavaFX 2.1 developer preview build is out. The build number is now b08.
• JavaFX.com is moving to be part of the Oracle Technical Website (OTN). For future reference, the URL will be http://otn.oracle.com/javafx.
• Adam Bien posted a tiny blog post showing how to include custom CSS in a JavaFX application.
• By now Weiqi Gao has given his JavaFX 2.0 talk, but he has posted the code from his talk. It details the Lissajous curve to show off the JavaFX 2.0 Path API and the properties and bindings framework.

• Richard Bair wrote about his 2012 JavaFX new years resolutions.
• Jasper Potts wrote a fun JavaFX 2.0 audio player, with source code included.
• Dustin Marx continues to blog about various JavaFX-related topics, including “Applying Sepia Effect to Loaded Images in JavaFX 2.0“, “JavaFX 2′s Ensemble and other Sample Applications“, “JavaFX 2′s Tri-State CheckBox“, and “Pair Class Coming to Java via JavaFX?“.
• Tom Schindl released e(fx)clipse 0.0.10, and quickly followed that up by version 0.0.11 to resolve a few release issues.
• Kai Tödter has blogged about JavaFX 2.0, Swing & SWT Renderers for the Eclipse 4.x Application Platform.
• Sai Pradeep Dandem has experimented with the TableView control to allow for setting percentage width of columns.
• Toni Epple has blogged about styling a custom JavaFX control with CSS.
• René Jahn has blogged about hooking a database up to a JavaFX TableView control.
• NetBeans 7.1 shipped this week, and includes major improvements for JavaFX 2.0, FXML and CSS.
• Johan Vos and I shipped another release of our DataFX library, taking the version number up all the way to 0.0.5! This release includes much improved REST data source support, and additional support for ‘independent’ CheckBoxTreeItems.

• Dustin Marx has written five blog posts related to JavaFX this week. The titles are “Sneaking a Peek at JavaFX 2.1 Beta“, “JavaFX 2.0 Bar and Scatter Charts (and JavaFX 2.1 StackedBarCharts)“, “Integrating JavaFX 2.0 with Swing and SWT“, “Rendering HTML Within JavaFX“, and “The Challenges of a JavaFX Reboot“.
• Ben Evans and/or Martijn Verburg posted about “What I learnt about JavaFX today“.
• Robert Felker has let me know he has written a tool called CloudExplorer for visualisation of data using JavaFX (and he has built it in Scala).
• It seems the current community effort is around building calendar controls in JavaFX. Today I came across the third implementation (I mentioned the other two last week). Sai Pradeep Dandem has written this weeks implementation.
• In a earlier post here at FX Experience, I posted a retrospective post looking at what has happened to JavaFX in the last 15 or so months.

Catch you in a weeks time, when I’ll be back in New Zealand!

• The big JavaFX news this week was the release of early access builds of JavaFX 2.1 for Windows and Mac OS.
• Here at the FX Experience blog, Jasper Potts blogged about styling JavaFX Buttons with CSS, where he demonstrated the power of CSS in JavaFX.
• In a separate post, Jasper posted a tool he developed prior to JavaOne 2011 that converts FXG into FXML.
• As mentioned a few weeks ago, one of the new features in JavaFX 2.0.2 is support for SWT interoperability. Richard Bair put up a sample application that integrates JavaFX Charts into an SWT application.
• The OpenJFX website was updated this week to include a ‘Getting Started‘ document, as well as the first two user experience specifications for Spinner and ‘DatePicker’. These two were posted first as they are being discussed in the openjfx-dev mailing list.
• Jim Weaver was interviewed in episode 61 of the Java Spotlight Podcast.
• Toni Epple has blogged about creating a custom DateChooser control. There is a bit of broken generic code at the top of the top of the DateChooserSkin class, but other than that it is a complete example. This is a control that is planned for a future release of JavaFX, but until then there exists both this DateChooser, and the one shipped as part of JFXtras. Hopefully one of these implementations may even be incubated and adopted into a future JavaFX release, now that JavaFX UI Controls are open source.
• Adam Bien has blogged about how to compile JavaFX 2.0 applications using Maven 3.
• In a separate post, Adam gave a very simple example of how binding works in JavaFX (in the form of a unit test).
• Dustin Marx has four JavaFX-related blog posts up this week: “Simple JavaFX 2.0 Text Example“, “(Pure Java) JavaFX 2.0 Menus“, “JavaFX 2.0 Christmas Tree (JavaFX 2.0 Shapes)“, and “JavaFX 2.0 Path Alternatives“.
• Carl Dea, who recently published the ‘JavaFX 2.0 Introduction by Example‘ book, has published a sample on his blog.
• For those attending JFokus, you may be interested in the ConferenceBrowserFX application Jim Weaver has created.
• For those in the St. Louis area, Weiqi Gao is presenting at the St. Louis Java User Group on the topic of JavaFX on January 12th.
• I try to not post videos as links, but every now and then break the rules. This week I have two interesting videos to share. Firstly, Gerrit Grunwald has put up a comparison video of his SteelSeries gauges, that demonstrates the difference (or similarity) between the Swing/Java2D and JavaFX versions. The second video is from Bertrand Goetzmann, where he shows off the latest features in Grezi.

I hope you found something useful Catch you in a weeks time!

• JavaFX 2.0.2 was released this week, bringing with it a heap of bug fixes, as well as a number of new features including SWT interoperability, and improved mouse scroll APIs. Additionally, the license was updated to allow for redistribution.
• A new JavaFX 2.0 Developer Preview release has been made available for Mac OS X.
• Coinciding with the release of JavaFX 2.0.2, the JavaFX Documentation team put out a number of new articles, covering topics such as JavaFX menus, styling charts with CSS, handling events, and others.
• The JavaFX roadmap has been updated to give more detail about future releases.
• Tom Schindl has announced the release of e(fx)clipse 0.0.9, as usual it comes with bug fixes and a few new features, including improved wizards, improvements to his fxgraph DSL, and early FXML support.
• Sven Reimers and Geertjan Wielenga have announced the eFX project, which is a JavaFX RCP based on the NetBeans RCP.
• John Smith has blogged about having a code editor in JavaFX by embedding the JavaScript CodeMirror editor inside a JavaFX WebView.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged about using ContextMenu in both JavaFX, and when embedded within a JFXPanel inside Swing.
• Dustin Marx has blogged “Hello JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by Command Line“.

• More JavaOne presentations are available online at Parleys.com. One of the presentations I gave is now available online also (Custom UI Controls and Charts in JavaFX 2.0).
• Richard Bair posted to the openjfx-dev mailing list instructions on how to build the open source JavaFX UI controls code. It is likely that we’ll publish a slightly more proper version of these instructions that I will link to next week.
• The Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group has another meetup this week. This time it is Per Bothner presenting the JavaFX WebView component. As always, if you can’t be there in person they will be live-streaming the event, which often works well and is well-worth attending if you have the time.
• Dan Zwolenski has put up a blog titled “JavaFX and MVP – a smörgåsbord of design patterns“.
• For those who use gradle, there is now a JavaFX plugin available for it.
• Carl Dea has published his booked titled ‘JavaFX 2.0: Introduction by Example‘. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t offer any feedback on it yet.
• Eric Bruno has blogged about creating a custom JavaFX container.
• Jim Kay has blogged about ‘experiments in 3D in JavaFX 2.0‘.
• John Smith has created a jQuery-based DatePicker ‘control’ that you can use in your own JavaFX applications.
• Sam Howard has blogged about writing a PDF viewer in JavaFX 2.0. In a separate post, he announces the release of a NetBeans plugin that allows for viewing PDFs inside NetBeans, as well as the ability to convert PDF files into JavaFX scenegraphs. In a third link, Sam provides the download details for a JavaFX library that allows for viewing PDF files inside JavaFX.
• Geertjan Wielenga has put up a few JavaFX-related posts this week around integrating JavaFX with NetBeans. Firstly he talks about a docking framework and module system for JavaFX 2.0. In his second post he talks about enabling deeper integration of JavaFX 2.0 into NetBeans. Thirdly, Geertjan notes that JavaFX 2.0 (and most notably the ‘Henley Sales’ end-to-end sample) wowed JavaOne Latin America. Finally, Geertjan thanks JavaFX for providing an embedded browser for NetBeans.

Catch you all next week…

• The big news of the week is that the first code drop of JavaFX 2.0 source code was finally made public as OpenJFX. The source code is for the UI controls (which is something I work on). If you are interested in learning more about UI controls, or helping to make them better, you should definitely sign up to the mailing lists.
  
• Adam Bien posted a quick blog post on how to go about getting and compiling the JavaFX 2 UI controls source code.
  
• Tom Eugelink has announced that the MigLayoutFX2 / MigPane project has moved to become a module of MigLayout itself.
  
• Dierk Koenig has mentioned that Oracle and Canoo are offering to write a rich JavaFX client application for your needs, free of charge.
• Niklas Hoffman posted recently to the JavaFX Forums introducing a project he has been working on: a ‘JavaFX property compiler‘. You can find out more at the Google Code project site.
• In a separate Google Code project, Niklas has also showed off a TreeChart component for JavaFX.
• Jim Weaver posted a sample ‘TweetBrowser‘ application.
• In another post, Jim Weaver made available the JavaFX application he is using to present at JavaOne Brazil, titled “The Return of Rich-Client Java”.
• Mario Torre posted a JavaFX pathfinding application.
• Roman Kennke has blogged about how the SwingView works. SwingView is a component Roman and colleagues are working on to enable embedding Swing inside a JavaFX application.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged some tips about migrating from JavaFX 1.3 to 2.0.
• The Register has written a three-page post on JavaFX 2.0. Personally, I’m pleased they found the TableView control to be so performant
• Related to the article at The Register, Tom Schindl has blogged to clarify the relationship between fxgraph (his own DSL) and FXML.
• Narayan Maharjan has blogged an introduction to FXML.
• I did a post to show how to disable alternate row highlighting in TableView and ListView controls when the rows contain no content.

That’s that for another week. I’ll catch you back here in a weeks time…..

• Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein has done another JavaFX 2.0 benchmark using the commonly favoured bubblemark animation test. As always, his findings are in-depth and well worth reading.
  
• Daniel Zwolenski (aka Zonski) has put up an early access release of his JFX Flow project. You can find the blog post announcing it here, the project site here, and the Google project here.
• Mark Stephens put up a teaser about a project he is working on to enable rendering PDF files inside JavaFX using the JavaFX scenegraph.
• Pedro Duque Vieira has put up some simple util methods to convert to and from BufferedImage in JavaFX. Just a word of warning: this uses impl_* methods.
• Rob Mayhew has blogged about showing fading status messages in JavaFX 2.0.
• Carl Dea has announced a book he is releasing through Apress in December titled “JavaFX 2.0: Introduction By Example“.
• Enrique García has a sample application showing JavaFX integration with Phys2D.
• Speaking of physics, Bertrand Goetzmann has put up the Groovy source code for the Grezi physics demo (which uses JBox2D, another physics library). You can also watch a video of it.
• Gail Anderson has blogged about the importance of JavaFX properties.
• This week Johan Vos and I put out a slight revision to the DataFX project, pushing it up to 0.0.4. This release includes increased CSS styling support for table rows, as well as early OSGi deployment support.

That’s all folks. Keep up all the great work and I’ll be back in a weeks time to cover everything that happens this coming week!