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, April 21

Hi all. It’s a public holiday here in New Zealand today, so I’m going to rush this post out so that I can get back to spending time with my family. Enjoy!

  • Gerrit Grunwald has two posts this week. Firstly, he has ported yet another of his Swing ‘SteelSeries’ gauges to JavaFX – this time it is the altimeter control. Because of this, Gerrit has announced a new small project called AirSeries, which are his JavaFX-based gauges for JavaFX. Secondly, he has created a FlipPanel control, which, as the name suggests, allows for a panel that can have content on both its front and back, and which can be flipped (in an animated fashion) to reveal the other side of the panel.
  • José Pereda has written RubikFX, which is a JavaFX application that uses the 3D graphics functionality to solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle.
  • Johan Vos has published a YouTube video showing off JavaFX on Android, using a Nexus 5 phone to read NFC cards. It is great to see all the effort that Johan and others have been putting into JavaFX on Android paying off!
  • Hendrik Ebbers has announced the release of DataFX 8 Preview 2. Release notes are available to understand the changes.
  • Dirk Lemmermann has posted his third JavaFX tip, which is to use the JavaFX Callback interface rather than creating your own custom interfaces.
  • Nathan Howard has a posted on how to set up key combinations in JavaFX to use as accelerators in menus. Personally I prefer to use the form KeyCombination.keyCombination(“Shortcut+C”), as it is a little less verbose (and still cross platform – ‘shortcut’ will map to ctrl on Windows and cmd on Mac.
  • Version 8.0 of Jubula and GUIdancer has been released with support for JavaFX applications.
  • Jeff Martin has updated SnapCode (the IDE and RAD tool for education, entertainment and the enterprise), to add hit detection and more.
  • William Antônio Siqueira has posted a port of his sentiments app post last week to use nashorn and JavaScript this week (as well at JavaFX, of course).

That’s us for another week. Catch you all next week, and keep up the great work folks! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, April 14

Another week, another bunch of links. Enjoy! 🙂

Catch you all next week 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, April 6

I’m going to be away from my computer for all of tomorrow, so here’s the JavaFX links from the past week, roughly 12 hours early! Enjoy 🙂

  • Gerrit Grunwald has posted twice in the past week. Firstly, he created a new gauge called ‘AirCompass‘, which he ported (quickly) from his Swing SteelSeries library. Secondly, he has created a ‘poor mans live editor’ by combining the JavaFX WebView component with the Nashorn JavaScript engine.
  • Amrullah has a post about a beta release of TiwullFX 2.0 (for JavaFX 8.0) being available for download and testing. This library is a very good one if you’re doing heavy table-related work (although I’ve not used it myself, I just think the feature set sounds cool).
  • Pedro Duque Vieira continues to improve his JMetro style for JavaFX, this time focusing on the Slider control. I’ve not really looked into Metro styling at all, but it seems to me that the slider fill colour on the vertical sliders appear to be coming out from the wrong side (the top rather than the bottom)? I guess it is hard to judge as the horizontal sliders are all at their zero position, so you can’t see what the fill colour is to the left of the thumb.
  • Jens Deters has blogged about using Swing and JavaFX in a single application by using JFXPanel.
  • Jeff Martin has updated his SnapCode project to include support for console i/o.
  • Simon Lissack has a blog post detailing the many ways in which external stylesheets can be loaded in JavaFX.
  • Frank Roth has a blog post about his jSona project mentioned last week (a JavaFX-based music player).
  • Bruno Borges has a blog post about his JavaFX version of the 2048 game. The source code is available, and as he notes, he used this project to better learn about a number of things, including lambda expressions, the Stream API, JavaFX 8, JavaFX CSS basics and JavaFX animations.
  • Sébastien Bordes has a post about JRebirth (his JavaFX application framework) running on Equinox.

Keep up the great work folks! Catch you all next week! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, March 31

A huge number of links this week – people really are having fun with JavaFX these days, which is great to see!! 🙂

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

JavaFX links of the week, March 24

Hi all. The big news this week was of course Java 8.0 being released, but that didn’t seem to stop all of you from getting your projects done – there is a heap of interesting news this week! Keep up the great work, and to everyone else, enjoy! 🙂

  • As mentioned, Java 8.0 / JavaFX 8.0 was released this week. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this is a major release of JavaFX, bringing with it a heap of new features and bug fixes, having been in development for a very long time! If you haven’t already, you can download JDK 8 from the usual source. Whilst that is downloading, you can learn more about what is new in JavaFX 8.0, or read the JavaFX documentation. There are heaps of features in this release, but some of my (very biased!) favourites include new controls (TreeTableView and DatePicker), UI control support on embedded platforms, print support, 3D support, bi-directional text support, and of course the new Modena stylesheet that is used by default. You can read more detail about the JavaFX features in JDK 8 in the release notes.
  • Tom Eugelink has added a new ‘CircularPane’ layout container to the JFXtras project. His blog post is a very interesting read that covers the details of implementing such a layout (to avoid overlapping nodes, for example).
  • Tomas Mikula continues to create interesting JavaFX projects! This week he has open sourced his EasyBind project, which “leverages lambdas to reduce boilerplate when creating custom bindings.” Overall it looks like a very useful library for people to investigate using in their projects.
  • Speaking of Tomas, he has also done a blog post titled “Trigger processing after a period of inactivity“, which shows how to use ReactFX to defer processing of user input until a specified period of user’s inactivity.
  • Michael Berry has blogged about draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX. This is something I’ve been wanting to do in JavaFX for a very long time, so I’m pleased someone has already done it 🙂 It would be great to see this contributed back to OpenJFX / JFXtras / ControlsFX so that it could be more widely used and tested.
  • Adam Bien has announced afterburner.fx version v1.4.4. This release includes support for resource bundles and improved support for mocking.
  • Dino Tsoumakis has updated followme.fx, a sample afterburner.fx project for iOS based on Adam Bien’s afterburner.fx.
  • Jens Deters has posted a call for people to verify the responsiveness of their applications to different screen / font size configurations, after he found one of his apps rendered poorly.
  • Christoph Nahr has released MIME Browser 1.3, a JavaFX-based application for browsing MIME messages that are locally stored in standard EML files.
  • Sean Phillips has a video titled “Enhancing NASA Mission Support with JavaFX 8“. The video demonstrates his work with JavaFX, ControlsFX, and NetBeans. Very impressive stuff.
  • Mark Stephens has a blog post with some screenshots / information about the new (and commercial) JavaFX-based PDF viewer that IDR Solutions is working on.
  • Dirk Lemmermann has released a first early access build of his (commercial) JavaFX-based FlexGanttFX library.

Catch you next week 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, March 17

A heap of links this week – you’ve all been very busy! 🙂

That’s all folks. See you next week! 🙂