JavaFX links of the week, April 3

by Jonathan Giles | Apr 3, 2012 | Links

Hello everyone! This is Carl Dea (@carldea) and I am filling in for Jonathan who is currently at JavaOne in Tokyo, Japan. This has been a busy week in the JavaFX community. Here are this week links.

(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!

JavaFX links of the week, March 26

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 25, 2012 | Links

Welcome folks to another weekly roundup. Keep up the great work everyone! 🙂

• 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.

JavaFX links of the week, March 19

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 18, 2012 | Links

Welcome to yet another week of JavaFX links. I hope you’re all doing well, and that you find something of interest in this weeks roundup.

• 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.

JavaFX links of the week, March 12

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 11, 2012 | Links

<warm-welcome />

• 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.

<best-wishes />

JavaFX links of the week, March 5

by Jonathan Giles | Mar 4, 2012 | Links

Hey everyone. Hope you’re all doing fine. Here’s another weeks worth of links. Enjoy! 🙂

• JavaFX 2.1 developer preview build 15 is now out for your development testing pleasure.
  
• Jasper Potts did two interesting posts here at FX Experience. The first post announces the availability of a FX Experience Tools application which should be downloaded and used by everyone interesting in styling their JavaFX applications. The second post discusses how he packaged this application into native Windows and Mac installers.
• Dean Iverson has announced the availability of the 0.1 release of GroovyFX. GroovyFX is a library for people wanting to write JavaFX applications in Groovy.
• Jim Weaver has a post up on the Oracle Technical Network website about laying out a user interface with JavaFX. This should be a must-read for anyone who wants to build JavaFX applications.
• The JavaFX 1.x series of releases have been given their marching orders – these releases will stop being available on December 20, 2012. This is not to be confused with the current JavaFX 2.x series of releases, which are plowing on full steam ahead!
• Tom Schindl has been having fun with SVG and JavaFX 2.0. He takes an SVG file, converts it to FXML, and then proceeds to look up elements of the scenegraph and animate them. This shows how easy it is for designers and developers to interact.
• Angela Caicedo, an evangelist at Oracle (a list that I even find myself on), has started a video series on YouTube demonstrating how to build a JavaFX application.
• Dustin Marx has a post detailing the JavaFX Color class.
• DataFX had ComboBox cell factory support added in to the source code repository this week.
• Johan Vos has announced that RedFX has been ported to JavaFX 2.x. RedFX provides functionality that allows JavaFX applications to share data with each other and with server applications without the need of writing lots of specific boiler plate code.

That’s that. Catch you next week!

JavaFX links of the week, February 27

by Jonathan Giles | Feb 26, 2012 | Links

Look at this – a post that is on time! Don’t expect this to happen too often 🙂

• As another week rolls around, we have another JavaFX 2.1 developer preview release available, taking the build number up to b14.
  
• Nicolas Lorain, a member of the JavaFX team at Oracle, and also known as @javafx4you on Twitter, has posted about his research into the JavaFX 2 developer community.
• Michael Heinrichs, yet another member of the JavaFX team at Oracle, has posted a blog post about his ‘most often asked questions about JavaFX‘.
• Speaking of questions people have about JavaFX 2, Dustin Marx has a post covering some of the questions he was recently asked at a conference he presented at.
• Peter Zhelezniakov, another JavaFX team member at Oracle, has a post about communicating between JavaScript and JavaFX with WebEngine.
• Geertjan Wielenga has posted about using the JavaFX WebView as a ready-to-roll NetBeans module for people wanting web browsing functionality.
• Dan Zwolenski has ported the ‘first contact’ application to Spring. First Contact is a simple JavaFX-based contact management system that has been used in earlier blog posts.
• In a separate post, Dan talks about ‘going remote – JavaFX and Spring‘.
• Roberto Marquez has created an animated TIX clock using JavaFX 2.
• Mark Anro Silva has a post about creating a ‘Tron-like’ effect in JavaFX 2 forms by modifying the CSS.
• Johan Vos and I put out a new release of DataFX this week. The main feature of this release is the availability of a JDBC data source. We also announced the availability of the source code for people to explore and provide feedback / features on. We even got a friendly write-up on jaxenter.

That’s all – catch you all next week. 🙂