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.

JavaFX links of the week, July 21

by | Jul 20, 2014 | Links

A relatively quiet week this week, with most people probably heads-down on JavaOne preparations by now. In any case, what we have below are some very interesting links, so enjoy! 🙂

  • The JavaFX dialogs discussion continues. This week I posted an updated summary of where the discussions are now, and of course there has been plenty more discussion since then in the Jira issue (RT-12643). The final API for dialogs is due in early August, so time is running out – if you want to offer your opinion on what JavaFX needs, and especially if you can relate it back to the proposed APIs in RT-12643, now is the time!
  • Dirk Lemmermann continues to post JavaFX-related tips, including ‘Beauty is Skin Deep‘, ‘Do Not Mix Swing / JavaFX‘, ‘Custom Composite Controls‘, and ‘Updating Read-Only Properties‘.
  • One area that I’ve seen a few people working on recently is support for detaching tabs from a TabPane in JavaFX. This is something I would love to see one day in JavaFX itself. This week Jens Deters offers up his implementation, which looks very nice and polished.
  • Geertjan Wielenga has posted about Monet, a project which offers tight JavaFX Scene Builder integration in NetBeans IDE, developed by Sven Reimers.
  • Josh Juneau has an article in the latest Java Magazine about JavaFX with alternative languages.
  • Alexander Casall has a post about decoupling the view and its behavior in JavaFX to create a testable UI.

Catch you all again next week!

JavaFX links of the week, July 13

by | Jul 12, 2014 | Links

Sorry about not posting links last week – I was on vacation, and the internet in my hotel was terrible. Because I didn’t get a post out last week, this week I have a heap of links to share. Enjoy! 🙂

  • Geertjan Wielenga has posted about his modular JavaFX Application Framework project, which looks promising.
  • Danno Ferrin has put out updated versions of the Gradle and Maven plugins for JavaFX 8u20.
  • Tomas Mikula has created a simplified VirtualFlow implementation for use in his RichTextFX project. VirtualFlow is used to efficiently handle ListView, TableView, etc. Tomas’ implementation is a more performant implementation, at the cost of reduced functionality. As the owner of the JavaFX VirtualFlow implementation, I would love to see the official code getting faster, but it is very, very hard to achieve without functional regressions. It is always one of those tasks I try to undertake once per release, but I think most of the low-hanging fruit has well and truly been picked. Quick update: I just spent an hour trying to improve the performance of the JavaFX VirtualFlow based on Tomas’ benchmark, and managed to take the results from 25/25/5/75 to 1/0/5/0 (refer to the flowless wiki document to understand what these numbers mean). You can see more detail in my last two comments over at RT-35395.
  • Dirk Lemmermann continues to post JavaFX-related tips, including ‘Have the Final Word‘, ‘Be Observable‘, ‘Use Transparent Colors‘, and ‘Use CSS Color Constants / Derive Colors‘.
  • Jens Deters has three posts. Firstly, he has a post talking about how to get rid of focus highlighting in JavaFX. David Grieves’ comment gives good insight into how borders are handled in JavaFX. Secondly, Jens has announced that MQTT.fx 0.0.4 has been released. Finally, Jens has a post about UI logic with JavaFX Bindings.
  • Andres Almiray has two posts on ‘getting started with Griffon and JavaFX’. The first post talks about “the new capabilities of the framework, specifically targeting JavaFX as the main UI toolkit and Java as the main programming language.” The second post talks about the same application as in part one, but using Groovy instead of Java.
  • Pedro Duque Vieira has blogged about the addition of a ToggleSwitch control to JFXtras, which also includes a JMetro style.
  • John Sirach has posted a review of the recently released JavaFX 8: Introduction by Example book.
  • Alexander Casall has a post about how to get the controller of an included FXML when using FXML composition.
  • William Antônio has a blog post about the Gainda project, which appears to be a DSL for creating JavaFX applications in JavaScript (using Nashorn).
  • Manuel Mauky has been working on an ‘Advanced Bindings‘ project for JavaFX, which, not surprisingly, is “a collection of useful helpers and custom binding implementations to simplify the development of applications that are heavily based on JavaFX’s Properties and Bindings. “
  • David Gilbert let me know that JFreeChart 1.0.18 has been released. He went on to say that “it features JavaFX support with a new ChartViewer control that renders charts to a Canvas node and handles tooltips, a context menu, zooming via mouse drag and wheel events, panning and mouse event notifications (more or less equivalent to the existing ChartPanel class used in Swing). This will ease the path for our users that are migrating Swing applications to JavaFX, as their charting code will require very minimal changes.”
  • Mark Stephens from IDR solutions (makers of the PDF viewing software for Swing and JavaFX) let me know that they “offer an Open source version (with less bells and whistles) under an LGPL license at http://www.idrsolutions.com/open-fx/“. He went on to say that “we wanted a generic free version which lots of people could use (including us in our NetBeans plugin) and we think there are lots of uses for this in embedded. Then a high end supported version with support and lots of extras (like a slick pageflow which could work really nicely on a Pi with touchscreen) which funds the development.”
  • Johannes Rupprecht has a post about custom transitions in JavaFX.

That’s a lot of links! Keep up the hard work folks, it’s fascinating reading what you’re all doing, and it makes me jealous that there aren’t more hours in the day to hack on all the stuff you’re doing.

JavaFX links of the week, June 30

by | Jun 29, 2014 | Links

Another quiet week this week. This is a very common pattern in the lead up to JavaOne – people tend to start working on their JavaOne projects and have less time for blogging. Anyway, enjoy the links! 🙂

Catch you all next week!

JavaFX links of the week, June 23

by | Jun 22, 2014 | Links

A relatively quiet week this week, which is good for me as I have a tonne of work to get into! 🙂

  • I did a very long blog post this week about bringing dialogs to JavaFX. In short, JavaFX 8u40 will be getting a dialog API, but it isn’t yet decided what the API will look like, so now is your chance to influence the API. You should definitely read the linked blog post first, and then you should go to RT-12643, read all of the comments there, and then post your feedback if you have anything to add! 🙂
  • Hendrik Ebbers has posted another sneak peak of the AeroFX project, a Windows 7 ‘native’ skin for JavaFX 8.
  • Andres Almiray has posted on boosting JavaFX application development, where he talks about afterburner.fx, afterburner.gfx, and lazybones.
  • Stephen Chin has posted a video from Stuart Marks’ recent presentation at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group, where he spoke on the topic of Java 8 and JavaFX.
  • Thomas Bolz has posted version 1.4 of his BaufiFX application, a mortgage calculator and financial analysis tool written in JavaFX.
  • Rene Jahn has posted on how he built a live ticker for the football world cup using headless JavaFX and the new ‘Monocle’ Glass windowing component of JavaFX. For those unfamiliar with Monocle, you can read more at the JavaFX wiki.

That’s all folks – short and sweet! Catch you all next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, June 16

by | Jun 15, 2014 | Links

Another week rolls around, and with it another weeks worth of links. Enjoy! 🙂

JavaFX

  • Tomas Mikula has two posts this week. Firstly, a post titled ‘detecting when the mouse stays still over a node‘. Secondly, he has a post on ‘separation of View and Controller in JavaFX Controls’, which is an interesting read, especially for me as JavaFX needs to have more public API around third party controls. The JavaFX Jira issue (RT-21598) is the best place to discuss this further.
  • Hendrik Ebbers has posted a sneak peak of some work currently being undertaken, to create a Windows 7-esque JavaFX style that is being called AeroFX. Already it looks very promising! This is a follow-on from the very successful AquaFX look developed previously.
  • Tom Eugelink has posted on his circle popup menu progress, which is available for download as part of JFXtras-8.0-SNAPSHOT-r2.
  • Jens Deters has released MQTT.FX 0.0.3. This is an application for publishing and subscribing to MQTT topics, which is commonly used in IOT projects.
  • Sébastien Bordes has announced the release of JRebirth Application Framework 7.7.2. This new version “fixes some troubles experienced with demo applications like bad image loading (by presentation engine) or animation failure that lead to an empty slide.”
  • The ReportMill blog has two posts this week. Firstly, they have announced that SnapCode, their IDE, is the ‘first and only pure JavaFX IDE‘. Secondly, they have posted some sample code for getting the visual bounds of a node. There is a Jira issue (RT-37509) for this functionality, and as I posted in there, I really wish someone would develop the code to make it possible to have a general-purpose glasspane in JavaFX (especially one that supports knowing the visual bounds of a node after scrolling, clipping, effects, etc).
  • Arnaud Nouard has posted that he has updated his Undecorator library for JavaFX 8.0, and that he has used this library in the development (and now release) of his aLive application, intended to “help music bands to organize rehearsals”.

That’s all folks. Catch you next week!

JavaFX links of the week, June 9

by | Jun 8, 2014 | Links

Another week, another round of interesting links. Enjoy! 🙂

That’s all for this week – catch you all in a weeks time.