JavaFX links of the week, March 25

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 24, 2013 | Links

Hi all – here’s this weeks links – enjoy! 🙂

• JavaFX Scene Builder b22 is available for Linux. Download it (along with versions for Mac and Windows) from the usual place.
• Hendrik Ebbers has two posts this week. Firstly a blog post about how to use native Aqua icons in JavaFX (when running on Mac OS X). Secondly Hendrik has blogged about assertions and rules in MarvinFX. MarvinFX is a testing framework for JavaFX is that Hendrik is currently developing.
• InteractiveMesh.org have released a 3D model importer for JavaFX 8.0 (using the new 3D capabilities that are included in JavaFX 8.0). At present it appears that source code is not available, but it would be great to see it.
• Speaking of 3D, as I mentioned last week, John Yoon from the JavaFX team at Oracle will be presenting at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group on March 27. As per usual you can attend in person or virtually. What’s cool is that John studied animation at the UCLA Film School, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in Animation/Film. Prior to working at Oracle, John worked in the animation industry as a Character Technical Director at Disney Animation and DreamWorks Animation on such films as “Chicken Little”, “Meet the Robinsons”, “Shrek Forever After”, and “How to Train Your Dragon”.
• ScalaFX 1.0.0 M2 was released recently. If you’re interested in building JavaFX-based user interfaces in Scala, then you should definitely check out this library.
• Yennick Trevels has two posts this week as he continues his ‘JavaFX: Structuring your application’ series. Firstly, he posts about the application logic layer, and secondly about the service and application state layer.
• Russel Winder has put up a slide deck for his talk on ‘GroovyFX: or how to program JavaFX easily‘.
• Jorn Hameister has posted code that generates the Mandelbrot fractal using JavaFX Canvas.
• mihosoft have announced that they have ported the JFXtras Window Control (VFXWindows) to JavaFX 8.0. They say the main motivation was to gain retina support, but note that performance is also significantly improved in JavaFX 8.0.
• tomo taka has blogged about creating a file system browser in JavaFX using the TreeView control.
• Pierre Jansen has released an app he calls ZebraBlender. As he puts it, it is designed to “assist in the creation of more accurate Geo & SpectroBlend waves for Zebra2 & Zebralette.” He goes on to say “Besides allowing you to precisely specify the value of each point in the wave, it also includes a Javascript interpreter which allows you to programatically specify the wave shape and/or wave set.” In short, it uses charts, embedded JavaScript and the new graphics APIs in an interesting way.

That’s all folks. Catch you all next week.

JavaFX links of the week, March 18

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 17, 2013 | Links

A heap of links this week, and I’ve already spent long enough writing the links out below, so let’s just get straight into it! 🙂

• JDK 8 b81 is out now for download, and as always contains the latest JavaFX 8.0 bits for you to test out.
• JavaFX Scene Builder 1.1 Developer Preview b22 is now available for download.
• Jasper Potts posted an updated blog post about the new Modena theme that is coming to JavaFX 8.0. It has come a long way since the first post on Modena six weeks ago, and much of the community advice has been listened to to refine the Modena look. Personally I think it is miles ahead of what we shipped in JavaFX 1.x and 2.x (which is known as Caspian).
• Tom Schindl continues to write a number of interesting blog posts detailing his current projects. This week he has three posts. Firstly, he talks about building an intelligent code editor with JavaFX and JDT. Secondly he has announced the release of e(fx)clipse 0.8.1 which includes a number of new features. Finally, he has details of his upcoming talks about e(fx)clipse and JavaFX at EclipseCon next week.
• Speaking of Eclipse, Kai Tödter has blogged about his experiments with GEF4 graphics being rendered using JavaFX Canvas.
• Hendrik Ebbers has started work on a testing framework for JavaFX that he is calling MarvinFX. I hope that this project gains a lot of traction with the community and can grow to encompass fixtures for all UI controls to make testing quicker and easier.
• It’s not for another week yet (so I’ll remind you again in a weeks time), but John Yoon from the JavaFX team at Oracle will be presenting at the Silicon Valley JavaFX Users Group on March 27. As per usual you can attend in person or virtually. What’s cool is that John studied animation at the UCLA Film School, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in Animation/Film. Prior to working at Oracle, John worked in the animation industry as a Character Technical Director at Disney Animation and DreamWorks Animation on such films as “Chicken Little”, “Meet the Robinsons”, “Shrek Forever After”, and “How to Train Your Dragon”.
• It is great to see the JetBrains folks starting to get right behind JavaFX. This week they have posted about their improved support for JavaFX 2 CSS in IntelliJ IDEA 12.1.
• A whitepaper was published over at the Oracle Technical Network about how Integra CCS uses JavaFX to power contact centers around the world.
• Björn Müller has published an article titled Why, Where, and How JavaFX Makes Sense.
• Farrukh Obaid has published another JavaFX skin, this time it emulates the look of the Office Silver look.
• Jens Deters has a post about custom components, where is explores hover effects.
• Jorn Hameister has blogged about how to create a JavaFX dartboard with Shapes (Path, Arc, ArcTo, Circle) and Text.

Keep up all the hard work folks – you’re doing such a great job and it is a pleasure reading what you’re all up to! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, March 11

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 10, 2013 | Links

Hi all – welcome to yet more JavaFX links! Hopefully there is something for all of you to learn from and enjoy. Have a great week and I’ll catch you again in a weeks time with yet more of your links! 🙂

• The Canoo blog has published part seven of their abacus tutorial, this time focusing on integrating OpenDolphin.
• Michael Heinrichs has updated his inverse kinematics library to work with JavaFX 2.x. You can find the sources of the library including the code of the two samples on GitHub.
• Björn from CaptainCasa has posted another JavaFX client update detailing some of the updates to the CaptainCasa software.
• Tom Eugelink has posted a ListView extension class (also called ListView) to JFXtras which allows for two-way binding of the selected item property. Whilst I haven’t had a chance to test this myself I know that this is an often-requested feature from some users of the ListView control (and the same concept can be applied to the other selection model based controls such as TreeView, TableView, TreeTableView, etc).
• James Sheets has started up a new project to provide enhanced TableView functionality around filtering, or, as he puts it, “a set of drop-in replacements for JavaFX’s TableColumn class, which provides a visual editor for users to create filtering.” It would be great to see these ported to JavaFX 8.0 and using the built-in filtered list functionality.
• Yennick Trevels has posted on structuring JavaFX applications.
• Narayan Maharjan has posted about pagination and style in the JavaFX TableView.

JavaFX links of the week, March 4

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 3, 2013 | Links

A heap of links this week, so let’s get right into it. Enjoy! 🙂

• Richard Bair posted a YouTube video of how to build OpenJFX on a Mac with JDK 8 b78.
• This week I interviewed Felipe Heidrich in relation to his work on text in JavaFX (most notably rich text). This follows on from the interview I published the week prior with Tom Schindl covering his styled text editor work.
• OpenDolphin 0.7 has been released, with support for Maven, server events and much better performance.
• IntelliJ IDEA 12.1 has been released recently, and it includes a bunch more support for JavaFX. If this is your chosen IDE then I would highly recommend you upgrade!
• Speaking of IDEs, Nicolas Lorain has blogged about the improved support for JavaFX in the top IDEs (namely NetBeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA).
• I released a second developer preview release of Scenic View 8.0.0 that starts to improve startup and discovery of running applications (but there is still much to do). Please leave any comments on whether or not it works for you in the comments section – this kind of app is truly a finicky one to get right! 🙂
• Claudine Zillmann posted an update on her work to develop a Mac OS X stylesheet for JavaFX. So far the progress looks good (but then I’m not all that familiar with the nuances of Mac OS X). All I can say is good luck – I look forward to reading more progress reports 🙂
• Hendrik Ebbers has written about how to set a global stylesheet in your application so that you don’t need to set it per scene.
• Mark Heckler has blogged about how to pretty up your JavaFX TableViews (something obviously near and dear to my heart). Some good advice here that anyone working with TableView should read (especially the updates at the end related to performance tuning!).
• Gerrit Grunwald has ported his Swing version of the QlockTwo to JavaFX.
• Angela Caicedo has posted the second part in her series on how to manage multiple screens in JavaFX.
• Robert Ladstätter has ported his Conway’s Game of Life implementation to use the JavaFX 3D APIs that are coming up in JavaFX 8.0.
• mihosoft has a blog up about making it possible to easily drag nodes in a JavaFX application.
• Rob Terpilowski has done another ‘extreme JavaFX gui makeover‘.
• Arnaud Nouard has released the 1.0 release of his Undecorator library for styling the stage ‘chrome’ of your application.
• Farrukh Obaid has posted more screenshots and a link to the source code for his MistSilver skin for JavaFX.
• Gianluca Costa has posted GraphsJ 3.0, “a modern didactic application dedicated to interactively execute graph algorithms; it features both a visual user interface and an SDK to develop custom scenarios.”

Catch you all next week.

JavaFX links of the week, February 24

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 23, 2013 | Links

Hi everyone, and welcome to another weekly links roundup. This weeks post is a day early as I’ll be out of town when I usually post. Anyway, enjoy! 🙂

• Tom Schindl continues his work on styled text rendering in JavaFX, going so far as to improve performance by 100x, and then developing a styled text editor using a combination of the new rich text support in JavaFX 8.0 and the ListView control.
• Speaking of Tom, you can find out more about what Tom has been up to with rich text in JavaFX in an interview I posted with him.
• John Hendrix has posted a YouTube video of a JavaFX Carousel control that interestingly is simply a new skin for the TreeView control that ships with JavaFX. I’d be interested in seeing the source code for this!
• Jarek Sacha wrote to let me know that ScalaFX 1.0 Milestone 1 has been released. As he puts it, “ScalaFX helps you simplify creation of JavaFX-based user interfaces in Scala. ScalaFX uses a simple, hierarchical pattern for creating new objects and building up the scene graph. ScalaFX supports full interoperability with Java and can run anywhere the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and JavaFX2 are supported. Current version supports most of the JavaFX 2.2.* functionality. For more information see ScalaFX home page.”
• Elisabeth Engel has posted on how to present Spring Data Neo4j Nodes in a JavaFX TableView.
• JacpFX, the RCP framework on top of JavaFX and Spring has reached version 1.2. This release is mainly a bugfix release and improves stability and overall performance.
• Jens Deters has updated his blog posts on how to use the ‘Font Awesome’ font in JavaFX. You can find read his earlier post for further context.
• Anton Epple has posted about he has written a Space Invaders clone in JavaFX using his fx2d library (and 175 additional lines of code).
• Arnaud Nouard has posted part two of his series on the Undecorator library he is developing, this time focusing on ease of integration with your application.
• Andy Till continues to develop his EstiMate application, this week releasing version 0.0.2. As he puts it, “EstiMate is not a project management tool, it is firmly aimed at software engineers and developers who need to provided accurate estimates for tasks to be performed by themselves and their team.”
• Farrukh Obaid has posted a video of a new CSS theme he has been working on for JavaFX. It looks good, but now I’m keen to see the code. Hopefully it is made available sometime soon (if it isn’t already).

That’s us for another week. Catch you again in a weeks time! Keep up the great work folks! 🙂

JavaFX links of the week, February 18

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 17, 2013 | Links

Hi all, a bunch of really good links this week. I hope there is something of interest to you all – enjoy! 🙂

• Richard Bair posted an open source status update, and included some news about iOS and Android plans. It is important to note exactly what Richard is saying, which I think is fairly well summarised by Tom Schindl over on his blog. This was also covered by Dustin Marx, Slashdot, InfoQ and Parity News, among others.
• The session recordings from JavaOne 2012 are now available online for your viewing pleasure. There are a heap of JavaFX-related videos in there, so you’ve got plenty to watch as time permits!
• Hendrik Ebbers has posted a preview of the ObservableExecutor feature that is coming in DataFX.
• Daniel Zwolenski has released JavaFX Maven Plugin 1.4.
• Speaking of Maven, Florian Brunner has posted about how to use the JavaFX doclet with Maven.
• Tom Schindl also blogged this week about experimenting with the new JavaFX rich text support coming in JavaFX 8.0. He has essentially built a working source code viewer (with proper syntax highlighting).
• In yet another blog post, Tom posted about an upcoming feature in e(fx)clipse: a smarter JavaFX CSS editor. It looks very nice! 🙂
• Dustin Marx has two other posts this week. Firstly, he has blogged about GroovyFX, and secondly about styling JavaFX pie charts using CSS.
• I always enjoy seeing people discovering my APIs. This week Anton Epple showed the power of the pre-built cell factories that have been shipping with JavaFX since 2.2.
• Speaking of Anton, he has two other blogs this week. Firstly, he blogged about how he has created a minimal JavaFX presentation player in JavaFX itself (which makes it really easy to demonstrate JavaFX concepts). Secondly, he blogged about how he implemented the A* algorithm for pathfinding in his JavaFX tile game.
• Jim Weaver has a post on lambda’s in Java 8, and how they impact the code you’ll have to write for JavaFX user interfaces (when you’re using Java).
• Canoo have posted part six of their JavaFX abacus tutorial, this week focusing on styling the user interface.
• Björn has posted an update about the CaptainCasa JavaFX client, including details on a date picker, virtual keyboard, a scheduler and other updates.
• Speaking of virtual keyboards, another one has just been released on Github.
• mihosoft have posted a video of their scalable content functionality that they recently pushed to JFXtras. It’s quite interesting technology.

Catch you all in a weeks time 🙂